Word: reid
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These are the sad facts that Father Thomas O'Neill, the fortuitously-named hero of James Reid's The Offering, must learn all too slowly. For O'Neill--a pro-Irish Nationalist Catholic priest in a pro-Irish Nationalist Catholic parish in Cambridge, Mass.--learning to see through the glamor and romance that surround the struggle in Ulster is an unusually difficult process. Like so many Irish-Americans, O'Neill has been raised by his good Catholic parents to view the agony of Ulster as a sort of holy war against the last vestiges of British heathenism--a holy...
That may have been Reid's idea when he set out to write The Offering, but somewhere along the way he got lost. Instead of a powerful tale of emotional and cultural conflict, Reid has written an extraordinarily convoluted and cliche-ridden spy story, replete with stoic federal agents, femmes fatales and toothless goons with a penchant for breaking people's kneecaps (a fine old Irish revolutionary tradition). The accent is definitely on the shoot-em-up angle; and if Father O'Neill behaves less like a man of the cloth and more like a pleasantly libidinous edition of Robert...
...that, though, The Offering is not a bad book. Granted, the "Irishmen" found therein speak largely in some strange tongue found only in that mysterious land that produces moronic commercials for Irish Spring deodorant soap. And granted, the reader sometimes finds it difficult to believe that Reid's characters can daily consume enough Irish whiskey to stagger a water buffalo, yet retain enough brain cells to run around breaking each other's kneecaps with undiminished fervor. But trivialities and stereotypes aside, Reid still manages to entertain: his federal agents and seductresses, while quite familiar, are still endearing. And his friendly...
Perhaps most important. Reid manages in a fine Irish fashion to carry a story. All the absurd trivialities of plot and subplot--with IRA goons, federal goons, British goons and even a few goons on personal retainer to the President of the United States, all doing their best to run each other over and muddy the storyline--finally mesh together in Hollywood style. Perhaps the setting makes the book more interesting than it really is: having set his story in Cambridge, Reid takes a name-dropper's perverse delight in alluding regularly to parts of the Harvard campus, which...
...there is really much more than that. For what Reid has begun, despite all the excesses and unavoidable artistic sacrifices to the commercial novelist's form book, is an intriguing story of a man at odds with his culture and his deepest beliefs. And it is all the more interesting because Father Thomas O'Neill is not just a little bit like Ireland itself: religious but unwilling to be stereotyped as such, bothered about his past, uncertain of his future, and unwilling to make the final wager in blood to achieve what he has been told all his life...