Thomas Keneally: An Angel in Australia

By JACK LEIGH

A catholic curate silently reciting the day's prayers as he rides in a Sydney tram, suddenly feels "cleft in two by the sharpest agony of loss".

The feeling has to do with the departure a few minutes earlier of a fellow passenger, "a beautiful young woman in a floral dress" and her little son.

The priest's defences are slightly dented by contact with her, but this is no tale of titillation. Father Frank Darragh is securely celibate, faithful to clerical discipline and fretful lest he somehow compromise the cloth.

He will meet the woman again, even visiting the house where she and her child live alone, and his initial pang is nothing compared with the turmoil that will follow. For she is murdered, and the young priest's innocent attentions are judged indiscreet by his panicky superiors who see the whole business as a disaster for the church and the parish.

The murder victim is a war wife whose husband is a prisoner of the Germans, and the story with a small cast of priests, American soldiers and dimly drawn Aussies, is set in a drab monochrome that fuses wartime Sydney with the life of the Catholic presbytery.

Author Keneally's storming vitality carries the narrative along, making whirlpools of action along the way. It is a story which in less competent hands might have crash-landed early, and had a long skid to the finish.

When the murderer whom we already suspect enters Fr Darragh's confessional on Page 253 with 83 pages still to go, and tells the priest that by murdering the woman he has created "an angel in Australia" - the book's title - there would seem to be no secrets left.

But mysteries of a different order underpin the novel, these concerning the arcana of the Catholic Church; the interlocking complexities which bind the young priest to his vocation. There is a telling chapter in which, needing to be reminded that his only possible joy is in pursuing the divine order, he is sent into retreat where an old monk who gives "seamless attention to every spoonful of time, to every obscure instant", explains that no person can own more than the present moment.

"Time is like a meal - each mouthful is separate and glorious," he says. It is after this thoughtful interlude that the story moves to its climax and a final confrontation between priest and murderer, for which Keneally chooses the exact moment of the 1942 Japanese midget submarine attack on Sydney harbour - an event which stops the show, and turns the antagonists into gawping spectators. And speaking of timing, a character on another page foretokens the modern aversion to the word "women" by saying, "Like other woman under stress ... " Is this a time-slip or a typo?

The book ends gracefully and calmly with Fr Frank, on extended leave and now an army medic, sitting on a New Guinea hilltop contemplating an eventual return to his vocation.

Random House

$49.95