Book reviews - Reading of Redemption

Turbulent Priests - Colin Bateman

I am always keen to investigate Irish writers and Bateman being Northern Irish has a special fascination. The movie Divorcing Jack which I haven’t seen lifted him into the big time but the first book I read was Maid Of The Mist and I wasn’t madly impressed. Pop novels I decided. However if the Canadian setting of Maid intrigued me, the setting of Rathlin Island (he spells it Wrathlin) was like a burning bush. My coastal home is yards from a beach that overlooks the said island. Add to this the fact that a friend studying theology in novels between 1950 and 2000 suggested it might be interesting and I’m in there.

And it was a winner. I got immediately gripped with setting, subject matter and the driving storyline and dark humour. Indeed at times I wondered how Bateman writes. Does he just sit down at a keyboard and knock it out from start to finish without as much as a break or revision. It reads that way. Fast, funny, loose. Yes it is pop lit but not without a whole lot of spiritual observation of some depth. When are hero is sent to check out the truth of rumours that the Messiah has been born, a girl, on Wrathlin island he and his wife go off to the idyllic idea of solitude and novel writing but get caught up in a murderous fundamentalist fringe of the Roman Catholic Church who believe that all necessary measures must be taken to protect the hope of the world. For me the fascination was Bateman’s seeming spiritual provocation on issues such as puritanical asceticism, woman and the dangerous consequences of believing that God has given you a word of prophecy. His setting them in a context of Catholicism.

So there’s the fast moving plot interlaced with questions to ponder. At least to ponder for someone like myself who spends every waking moment and gets paid exorbitant amounts of money to think on such things. I’m not sure how the average man on the street would see it. The most memorable bit of the whole thing for me and a wee inkling into Bateman’s pathetic but funny all the same sense of humour is when a body that he suspects to be Bill Oddie is brought into the midst of the islanders. His wife asks him if this he was a baddie and Stark replies, 'No. He was a Goodie!' Wonderful.

Back