I <3 Books

2009

This book won the Giller. It isn't a very good book. It's tedious and slow. It shuffles, like the priest, the book's namesake. The Giller two years ago was excellent, the brilliant Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. Even the title catches attention. I never read last year's Giller, Late Nights On Air because I assumed it was going to be a fictional memoir written by a reporter without any real imagination. I don't know it that's what Late Nights On Air is (I still don't plan on reading it), but I know for certain that that's what The Bishop's Man is. NOTHING HAPPENS IN THE STORY. The author is not a gifted fiction writer, and shows very little imagination. A lot is hinted about, but the author's abilities of foreshadowing and subtlety are too limited to make any of these hints interesting. They're just annoying because they are too vague and repeated too often.

A priest in Nova Scotia is coping with shame in his own past, and helps protect the church from the shame of other priests. None of this shame is ever revealed, you spend a lot of the time reading about a priest who has vague regrets and vague uncertainties about the future. Reading this right after reading John Irving, a master of foreshadowing who is never, ever, vague about shameful indiscretions, was a mistake. Irving's book so overwhelmed this one, that The Bishop's Man never had a chance.

Irving even says in Last Night In Twisted River that way too many reporters try to write fiction, and all of them follow that "tiresome Hemingway dictum of writing about what you know". That's exactly what this author does, there is little imagination, and it is tiresome.

This is one of two books now on this list that I quit before finishing.