Word: priestly
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Consulting the planets, Astrologer Mahant Raghvir Dass, high priest of Delhi's Hanuman (Monkey God) temple, made a direful prediction: "The 13 months after May 5, 1955, will be inauspicious for marriages." The news had Delhi state in a marital dither last week. Unmarried thousands hurried to get hitched before the full moon in the sign of Vrischika...
...temper of religious faith is best measured against the pressures of human weakness. In The Power and the Glory Graham Greene gave a classic demonstration of the ordeal by inner torture that follows when a priest who is a weak man falls from grace. Now Ronald Hardy, a young (35) Englishman (and an Anglican) has written a first novel that establishes him as Greene's No. 1 disciple...
...ruined pagoda, and is horrified by his sudden vision of his own God "dying in the grasp of the foul, green fungus, speckled with the disease of decay." At the front Colonel Lejeune, a magnificent soldier, tells him with cold insolence that he would have preferred reinforcements to a priest. The French are corroded by defeatism, many of the soldiers are themselves Communists, the colonial troops are unreliable. In this atmosphere, Chaplain Roget's spirit is badly battered. Fear paralyzes him in the midst of a vicious battle for a strongpoint. When Roget lets his driver die without trying...
...this point the priest hardly seems worth saving, but Novelist Hardy gives him one more chance. During a retreat from the victorious Communists, an officer is hit by machine-gun bullets and begs for the priest. Again fear seizes Roget, but this time the colonel unexpectedly helps him find his soul. Standing beside the priest, Lejeune says with great compassion: "All right. Go now. Don't crawl. Walk out to him." When Roget goes to the dying man, it is the beginning of his return to faith and self-respect...
Some critics may argue that the priest is too patly saved, but combat soldiers will find nothing unnatural in this result of trial by battle. Author Hardy's terse story is not only credible, it is played out in a setting that is both exciting and topical. Himself a liaison officer in IndoChina at the close of World War II, he has written battle scenes and jungle descriptions that are hotly authentic. Now an accountant, Hardy wrote The Place of Jackals as "an antidote to this rather boring job." No one who reads it will be bored...