Since The Da Vinci Code, novelists have been trying to outdo Dan Brown with plots to rock the foundations of the beliefs of 1 billion Roman Catholics, but have had no discernible effect on Holy Mother Church. What became of Jesus, who lived and died a Jew, is a moot question.
Catholicism grew and expanded, had its ups and downs, as pope follows pope. And there are novelists who write positively about the “True Faith”. Among them is Canadian Louise Penny. Her niche in literature is detective thrillers set inside churches. In the process, she traces Roman Catholic practices.
Penny tells you more than you may wish to know and doesn’t care for condensing. If ever a 500-page story deserved to be 350 pages, The Beautiful Mystery is it. It has two plots: finding who battered in the skull of a monk at a monastery in the Canadian wilderness; and a course in
Gregorian chants.
The Surete in Montreal assigns a homicide detective to solve the former. The Vatican sends a Dominican priest re the latter, to authenticate the provenance of a rare old book on chants.
Ultimately, the plots intertwine. The monastery has two dozen monks. A red herring is dragged in front of virtually each one.
This reviewer likes Gregorian chants (a half-hour at one sitting). But at the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups the monks sing them morning, noon and night. The book notes that the chants originated in ancient times, well before Pope Gregory. One theory is that Jesus disliked music. Another is that the voices imitate the voice of God.
Why was the choir director murdered? Monks are men after all, liking and disliking their fellows. Still, nobody knows better than them that killing is a mortal sin with dire consequences upstairs. As they all hide their violent feelings, the detective racks his brain to uncover his quarry. What Penny comes up with is clever, albeit not entirely credible.
From her detailed descriptions, a monastery is an interesting place to visit, but I wouldn’t like to live in one. Certainly not with the daily services monks have to perform there.
As is expected in crime fiction, the detective gets his man (who has a pretty good reason for his deed). And the Dominican gives his nod to that rare old book.
The author has done her homework and you’ll learn a lot about Gregorian chants. But when it comes to laying out a crime, Louise Penny is no Agatha Christie or Ruth Rendell.
Down Argentina way
With the Monroe Doctrine of two centuries ago, the imperialist powers got notification that they weren’t welcome in the western hemisphere. And many left, a step ahead of the natives’ machetes. But the Latin American countries didn’t turn to democracy as Washington wanted them to. Rather, there were revolutions and civil wars. Dictators ruled for the most part.
Republics weren’t republics, the Dominican Republic least of all. There were “strongmen” in Cuba and Chile, Haiti and Paraguay. Eva Peron’s charisma was instrumental in pushing General Juan Peron to the top. He was noted for giving — or, should I say, selling — sanctuary to top-
ranking Nazis.
The military dominated the government in Buenos Aires thereafter, making opposition figures disappear. But they bit off more than they could chew when they invaded the Falklands. The British recaptured those islands and sank an Argentine battleship in the process.
The US and Argentina get along. But that’s not the way Clive Cussler and Jack Du Brul see it in The Silent Sea. The fault is with the Argentines, who blame their own shortcomings on the Yanks. Then again, there are some things the Argentines do that they shouldn’t be doing.
That South American country is led by a Generalissimo and his officers are trying to impress him in order to get promotions and more power. Even fathers and sons in the army are competing with each other. And trusted adjutants aren’t above lusting after their superior’s wife.
Evidence has been found that a treasure junk, sunk five centuries before, is lying at the bottom of the sea off Antarctica. Beijing has a submarine searching for it. An Argentine officer offers his assistance to the sub’s captain in return for a share of the treasure as a mark of China’s gratitude. To ensure that there’s no foreign interference, he kidnaps 18 Australian scientists as hostages.
Enter the US submersible Oregon to the rescue. Its crew, “The Corporation”, is an unofficial elite team. The later chapters of the book are devoted to The Corporation rescuing the hostages, sinking a cruiser and fighting off half the Argentine army. The junk is buried under a glacial avalanche.
Clive Cussler is a seafarer and a successful author of adventure thrillers. His drawback is that he tends to get too technical about what makes ships and boats run. Had the Titanic a fraction of them, it wouldn’t have encountered the iceberg.
