Confusions and confessions

When a young soldier confesses his homosexuality, another reveals his pedophilia, and another describes a ménage à trois, Frank finds himself disoriented by the rich variety of depravity, struggling to make sense of these new pages thrust into his moral atlas.

He tries to maintain "a voice which fraudulently implies that he has heard everything that could possibility be confessed," but inside he's shocked. For the first time, his comforting arguments and platitudes seem colorless and silly.

Staggered, Frank falls into a state of accidie, "a sort of religious version of profound boredom, a sense of the withdrawal of grace." The anxiety this inspires raises his usual earnestness to a fever pitch. Without entirely realizing it, he comes to believe that the key to his own salvation rests on saving these parishioners - some sincerely thirsting for reformation and some not.

In this needy state, convinced of his indispensability, he's an easy mark for manipulation by others - and his own will. One of the most troubling and ambiguous episodes involves a black American serviceman arrested for desertion. Frank throws himself into the middle of the case, insisting that he has some special insight, but he may just be getting the Australian wool pulled over his eyes.

Keneally is always gentle with this eager and sometimes pompous young priest, but he won't let him escape the humiliation he deserves. "It isn't that you lack virtue," a chaplain warns him. "It's that you have too much of it for the world to work with."

In fact, he has more than excess virtue. Soon, he becomes obsessed with a married woman in his church, writing her notes and bending the customs of his office to see her again. Frank attributes his new "flexibility" to the extraordinary demands of war - the need to meet parishioners where they are. But Keneally investigates all the tributaries of this young man's mind, showing the way he conflates logic and desire, responsibility and pride.

Despite careful efforts to hide his compromising relationship one moment and convince himself that he has nothing to be ashamed of the next, events pick up a velocity of their own, and Frank spirals into a scandal that threatens everything he believes in and even his life.

What a strange pleasure it is to encounter this kind of psychological precision in the portrayal of a character's spiritual development. There's no shortage of despair in modern literary fiction, or angelic fluffernutter in religious fiction. But Keneally brings to the table the skills of a superb novelist and a sensitive cleric. (He studied for the priesthood as a young man but left before ordination.) The result is a terrifically engaging analysis of the challenge of simple piety in a complicated world.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. E-mailcharlesr@csmonitor.com.

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