Confusions and confessions

With "Schindler's List," Thomas Keneally documented the saintly work of a hedonistic man at the center of the 20th century's most ghastly crisis. The Booker Prize-winning book and the Academy Award-winning film raised the sort of awesome questions about our own moral courage that, thankfully, few of us will ever have to answer.

"Office of Innocence," Keneally's latest work is set in World War II also, but it's far from the heat of battle or the furnaces of genocide, way off on the periphery of crisis where most of us make the decisions that will redeem or doom us.

Frank Darragh, a new young priest on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia, begins this sensitive novel "dazed and delighted with his sacramental duties." While other priests perform the rite of confession "in a brisk, functional way," Frank radiates a spirit of mercy that draws parishioners to him. In fact, it's a little embarrassing the way they line up outside his box, dwarfing the paltry line at his monsignor's door. In these tense times, with husbands and brothers fighting far away in Europe or Africa and rumors of Japanese invasion circling, Frank's uplifting conviction of God's grace is a comfort that dispels the petty sins of undisciplined boys and tempted housewives.

Keneally's witty dissection of shame never gives a hint of pomposity or cynicism. The characters who implore Frank for forgiveness form a wonderful catalogue of human comedy: women who confess excessive pride so they can describe the reasons for their pride; tormented saints "locked in such a relationship to their own sinfulness that no other events count"; legions of young men deluded by the narcissism of guilt to imagine that their private offenses are new to the world - and of interest.

Without ever sacrificing Father Frank's humanity or our credulity, Keneally portrays "exactly the sort of unsullied, unworldly, yet not stupid young man the seminary sought." Indeed, he seems at first like the kind of person all of us should strive to be, or to be again. But there's a tragic theme running through this fable about the cost of confusing spiritual innocence with emotional immaturity.

The novel follows Frank on a kind of pilgrim's progress, a virgin errand into the wilderness of real life that explores the author's uncanny insights into the nature of sin and redemption.

Frank sets off to discover others' salvation holding the trusty compass of church doctrine with his sights fixed on mercy. He was raised in a terrarium of maternal protection where the moist air of piety allowed him to flourish without ever encountering the confessions he begins to hear in the stirred climate of wartime. "He was prepared by the sins which occupied the major headings in Nolden's 'Moral Theology,' " the narrator notes with a tone that somehow honors Frank's sincerity, but mocks his confidence. "Surely, the footnotes of extreme perversion belonged to Europe, to France, say, with its world-weariness and its ancient record of sin."

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