Religion and policing mix in O'Donovan's 'The Priest'

By Gerard O'Donovan

Scribner. 323 pp. $25

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Reviewed by Peter Rozovsky

Good stories run through

The Priest

, Gerard O'Donovan's debut novel about a rash of sex assaults in Dublin, though some of the stories are marred by the telling.

One story is an ambitious reporter's ruthless pursuit of a hot lead. O'Donovan's own journalism background presumably shields him from allegations of media-bashing, and those parts of the novel feel right and credible.

Another, likely foremost in O'Donovan's mind, given the book's title, is the putting of "the crucifix back at the heart of Irish writing," as he told an Irish television interviewer.

A third concerns professional rivalries within the Irish police that alternately threaten to keep Inspector Mike Mulcahy on the main investigation and to force him off it.

Religion first. The attacker robs his young female victims of crucifixes they wear as jewelry, inflicts horrific injuries shaped like a cross, murmurs prayers during his assaults, and taunts prospective targets with Bible verses. One victim describes her attacker as like a priest.

That may sound like lots of crime novels from recent years, be they Irish or Scandinavian. But O'Donovan doesn't get inside the attacker's head or revel in pornographic descriptions of the wounds he inflicts. What we do get is Mulcahy's frustration at his colleagues' and superiors' resistance to the idea that religion is a factor in the attacks.

That, I think, is what O'Donovan meant by his remark about the crucifix, and it must be part of the novel's message, if one can ascribe didactic purpose. Religion still matters, even in the new Ireland. Mulcahy's frustration and his colleagues' resistance lend the novel its main narrative drive.

Now for the complaints. As O'Donovan moved the building blocks of the story into place, I could too easily, er, see him moving building blocks into place. An observation here seemed designed solely to set up a conflict there. Characters make references that seem obviously calculated to create obstacles for the protagonist later on, and probably are. But I want to be able to suspend my disbelief, to feel that I am seeing a story unfold naturally.

That's a macro complaint. On the micro level, O'Donovan needs to cut the dialogue tags. A plain, shouted "Bollocks!" is a lot more effective than "Bollocks," Healy cut in again, his finger jabbing the air. "Yeah" is a lot better than "Yeah" was all she said in reply. The novel is full of such brake-slamming, action-stopping, tension-dissipating passages. Give me more Bollocks! and fewer jabbing fingers.

The reader's patience might also be strained by characters who "toe the line," "rock the boat," and "go for it," not to mention one who "wasn't going there." And I hope O'Donovan will rethink his efforts at verisimilitude in dialogue. No one wants to hear a character preface every third sentence with "I mean" any more than hear a speaker punctuate every second utterance with "y'know."

Book-jacket biographies delight in recounting, perhaps even embellishing, crime writers' occupational histories. O'Donovan's is not up there with the colorful background Julian Barnes adopts when he writes as Dan Kavanagh. But he is the first crime writer I have ever seen whose bio touts him as a former gherkin-bottler.