Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...matter. We have admitted that a politician must be representative -and that means he must be predictable. He must be chosen because his general circle of thought is known. He is not likely to depart too markedly from that agreed-on area of thinking. If he were startlingly novel in his approach, liable to strike off on his own, capable of bold invention, unafraid of its consequences, only an idiot would ask him to represent the mass of common...
...classic tests of a writer is his ability to persuade an audience to suspend disbelief. Walter F. Murphy persuades. In his hands, the audacious thesis of this massive, complex first novel becomes fascinatingly logical and intellectually gripping. No better fiction on the world of the Vatican is now in print. Murphy, a Princeton law professor, is a compulsive storyteller, and in The Vicar of Christ he tells three tales that could have made books in themselves. Part 1, reliving Declan Walsh's military adventures in Korea through the ripely phrased recollections of a Marine master gunnery sergeant...
Neither Francesco nor the novel that contains him is without great flaws. The barracks vulgarity of Part 1 is as tedious as basic training, and the narrator's stilted diction in Part 2 is hardly more en dearing. Women serve principally as walk-ons in The Vicar of Christ, including Declan's wife Kate, whose tragic death drives him to the monastery...
Ultimately, though, Murphy's work is a novel of ideas: political and religious, sa cred and profane. The moral problems of war and peace, life and death, change and tradition, poverty and riches are questions that pursue every human. Murphy can not fully answer them, nor can Pope Francesco I. But they are asked in a way that cannot be ignored, and they will haunt the reader long after this remarkable epic is finally laid down...
Murphy's researches in Rome in 1973-74 and last year gave him an eerie prescience. In the novel, Pope Francesco visits Mexico and enunciates the church's position on political involvement: "The church must be independent . . . We can not have a material stake in the status quo or in revolution or in any of the other possible political events in between. We must be free to preach justice and to do justice." Those were the precise ideas, if not the very words, of Pope John Paul II on his visit to Mexico last January, well after...