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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

A Sense of Urgency

A Sense of Urgency

This short book is a striking example of the kind of novel which breaks down the mental habits of propriety in order to attempt a greater unity than could otherwise be achieved. A woman commits bestiality and is burned to death. A young priest goes on a nightmare journey through the slums of New York, in search of his sister, who has disappeared after murdering her illegitimate child. Miss Helegua writes with a mixture of realism and surrealism. Emphatically the work is not a melodrama. The various horrific episodes are wholly convincing.

The young priest, who is the central character of the book, has been in one sense deranged by a vision of the unrelieved and absolute suffering by which certain of his parishioners are devoured: in another sense, he is brought to his senses and made able to approach his suffering neighbours as a fellow-victim. But the change involves a break with the ordinary pattern of his priestly duties. I feel that Miss Helegua intends to present him as a type of Christ in the modern world unaccepted because the world shuts out the knowledge of a suffering which seems too great for human participation. His search is inconclusive, and the book ends with his being thrown out of a church for preaching an unauthorised sermon while another priest is saying Mass.

As with most writers who draw on their experiences of the Catholic Church for use in fiction, there is a strong anti-clerical bias in Miss Helegua’s work. A mad priest is held up as an exemplar to the sane ones, so that they may not so easily forget the existence of the human heart. In practice such an exemplar would be of help to nobody; but in Miss Helegua’s story, the portrait is convincing and the sense of moral urgency is communicated.

1964 (322)