Word: maitlands
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Keneally is what the Irish call a spoiled priest-after years of novitiate, he did not take his final vows. Thus his fictional priests are drawn from knowledge, not research. His protagonist, James Maitland, with a fresh doctorate from Louvain, is a 29-year-old priest teaching history in a Catholic House of Studies. Set off as it is against the Mediterranean glitter of Sydney's splendid harbor and the sunburned hedonists who inhabit it, this comfortless, twilit gothic barracks with an "eczema of stained glass," emphasizes one of the book's controlling ironies. For Maitland fits neither...
...such, The Meanings of God causes deep offense to Des Boyle, a local L.C.L. (Leading Catholic Layman), who heads something called the Knights of St. Patrick and has all the tricks of chancery politics at his blunt fingertips. Boyle has talked the Archbishop of Sydney into asking Maitland to write a refutation. It would be a refutation of his own book, but the time has passed when Maitland can possibly admit to his own duplicity. It can be seen from this exquisitely complex confrontation that Keneally is far from making a loaded brief for the modernist clergy against the hard...
...home. Said Barry Goldwater a former Air Force Reserve major general who has known LeMay for years: "I hope he hasn't made a mistake, but I think he has." There was even flak from his mother-in-law "I idolize Curt," said 91-year-old Maude Maitland a staunch Republican, "but I'm very, very disappointed. Mihai Patrichi LeMay's boss at California's Networks Electronic Corp,, declared: "Wallace is a no-good bum. He just like the dictators when they got started in Europe. May's former colleagues in the Pentagon were also...
Inadmissible Evidence progresses through what James Joyce called "epiphanies": episodes of cumulative revelation. The witnesses called up for Maitland's defense damn him. They are the reproofs of his decay, shadowy chroniclers of loss, rejection, betrayal and defeat. His upbraided, put-upon clerks are walking legal briefs, drawn up against Maitland's corrosive contempt for his work. His wife (Eleanor Fazan) attests Maitland's bankrupt marriage. He resorts to his sage and patient mistress (Jill Bennett), not to exchange the gift of self but to flee from self. His casual office couchmates simply represent a frantic release...
None of this makes Maitland either admirable or appealing. The fascination of his character rests in the fact that Osborne has made him incontestably and hypnotically real and the symbol and substance of buffeted humanity in the complex 20th century. His fears are shocks of recognition for the audience. Where man was originally created in the image of God, Maitland is disturbed and resentful of his being remade in the image of the computer. He is outraged that the soothsayers of scientific progress seem to be sundering the old blood ties that linked man to man. Maitland envies the young...