"HE WAS A BAD priest, he knew it." Graham Greene's whiskey priest risks his life to celebrate Mass in anticlerical Mexico. He's an enemy of the state, a man of God and the great hero of "The Power and the Glory." Father Frank Docherty, the protagonist of Thomas Keneally's new novel, "Crimes of the Father," is a bad priest to some and a good one to others, and he certainly knows it. Sent away from his native Sydney in 1972 by an archbishop who found Docherty's political activism and theological liberalism unacceptable, he is by the 1990s a psychologist and a professor in Canada. Under those auspices, he researches the sexual abuse of children and minors by the clergy. "He knew the suspicion he attracted from his brethren in the wider priesthood. He was a priest who ponced around academia all week, dealing with unhealthy and distasteful subjects, and helped out at a local parish on the weekend - how graceful of him!" For his 36 th novel, Keneally has chosen a subject that is by now painfully familiar to both Roman Catholics and the wider public. The main action takes place in Sydney in 1996 and concerns the city's longstanding Irish population. This is a time and place and community in which those abused are just beginning to come forward more boldly, while church leaders and the faithful more broadly are themselves only just starting to reckon more openly with longstanding patterns of institutional failure, corruption and concealment. As he returns to Sydney to lecture on his research, resume complicated friendships and seek permission from the current archbishop to celebrate Mass again in his native archdiocese, Docherty becomes involved in an intertwined series of private and public revelations. For obvious reasons, Keneally admires his protagonist. As such, Docherty is not especially interesting, for he rarely seems genuinely unsure of himself. Whether he's preparing to confront an elite clergyman and his superior with evidence of the clergyman's abuse or trying to deal with once strong, now reheated feelings for a married woman, his struggles come across as stylized, even romantically heroic. You can be damned sure, mate, that toughand-tender ol' Docherty's going to do the difficult thing, and do it well, no matter the odds. The novel's far more distinctive and wellwrought character is Sarah Fagan, the Sydney cabdriver who picks up Docherty at the airport upon his return. Through intensely told flashback sequences, Keneally brings out the confusion and pain teenage Sarah experiences when she comes under the influence of Father Leo Shannon, a rising young star in the archdiocese. Under the guise of hiring her as his office assistant, Shannon makes Fagan feel privileged, even blessed, to spend secret time doing secret things with him. When he coolly rejects her for other girls, "she felt the jolt of this news, and a sickening bewilderment in the pit of her stomach; the extreme sentiments of the rejected." From this brilliant, brutal rendering of Fagan's victimization, Keneally traces out her jagged trajectory through a convent childhood, university studies, a teaching career and assorted vocational and spiritual spinouts, and finally into her very tentative alliance with Docherty. This last happens to coincide with Docherty's confrontation with Shannon himself, now a key adviser to the archbishop in legal proceedings concerning another abuse case. The heroism and villainy that play out thereafter is suspenseful, if predictable. Far more powerfully felt is Fagan's unexpected expression of thanks to Docherty, near the novel's end, for a favor he's done her, which has made possible both personal renewal and public justice. "What favor is that?" the priest asks. Her answer: "You believed me."

The scandal involving the sexual abuse of children by the clergy of the Catholic Church in Australia fuels this well-intentioned if oddly passive novel by the author of Schindler's List. Set in 1996, the story follows likeable and intelligent Father Frank Docherty, exiled to Canada decades earlier for his liberal political views, who returns briefly to Sydney to see his aging mother and deliver a speech on the relationship between celibacy and child abuse. Coincidentally, the woman who drives his cab from the airport was abused as a girl by "smarmy" Monsignor Leo Shannon (the brother of a woman, Maureen, with whom Docherty was once tempted to break his vows of chastity). So was another young man who recently committed suicide, Docherty discovers. The novel moves awkwardly among scenes from Docherty's earlier life, a case history of the cab driver, the memories of Maureen, and the present building of a case against Monsignor Shannon. While the subject matter is timely and relevant, and Keneally makes a clear distinction between the virtues of the "misrepresented and abused" Jesus and the "apparatchiks of the Church," the novel comes across as closer to essay than effective narrative. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Father Frank Docherty is no stranger to controversy. As a young Australian priest, he was banished to Canada because of his political views on apartheid and Vietnam. But when he returns to visit Australia in the late 1990s, he finds his research into how the Catholic Church has handled cases of sexual abuse leading him to the victims of a priest he knows, and into a dispute that gets to the very heart of morality and faith. The celebrated author of novels including Schindler's List (1982) and The Daughters of Mars (2013) has crafted a nuanced exploration of the people victims, clergy, and laity at the heart of the scandal that has rocked the church and its followers. Keneally, who as a young man had studied for the priesthood, ventures deep into ecclesiastical territory, such as the 1968 letter from the pope on birth control, while building a comprehensive portrait of the different experiences his various characters have had with the church. The result is stunning and heartrending, a work of fiction that has the terrible ring of truth.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2017 Booklist

Perhaps best known for the Booker Prize-winning Schindler's Ark, released here as Schindler's List and later adapted into an Academy Award-winning film, Australian novelist Keneally's literary career spans six prolific decades and more than 30 novels. This book harkens back to both a theme in his first novel, The Place at Whitton, and to his career path before becoming a writer: the Catholic priesthood. The novel opens with Father Frank -Docherty in a cab, returning to his hometown of Sydney, Australia, to visit his elderly mother after being sent to Canada for his outspoken views. A terse and confrontational conversation with the cab driver uncovers a sexual abuse scandal centered on the church's revered defender, Monsignor Leo Shannon. As -Docherty identifies the victims and reveals the truth, he begins challenging a hierarchy and power structure that has sanctified and defined his own existence. VERDICT Through the mind of his aggrieved and conflicted protagonist, Keneally pens an unflinching meditation on the ways in which canonical scripture, sacred tradition, and human conscience often coalesce to distort basic moral truths. [See Prepub Alert, 5/15/17.]-Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., -Hamilton, NY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests in Australia gets a sensitive but uneven treatment by the author of Schindler's List.From the moment Father Frank Docherty returns to Australia in 1996 after a long absence, he is embroiled in controversy. The woman driving his cab angrily refuses money when she learns he is a cleric. Docherty, a psychologist studying abusive priests, thinks she is part of the "enlarging rage now loose in the world" as cases have begun to emerge publicly. He finds out that she is a former victim and an ex-nun. When a suicide note in another case names a local monsignor, Docherty must confront the priest's sister, with whom he nearly strayed from his vow of celibacy when he was younger. Australian writer Keneally (Napoleon's Last Stand, 2016 etc.) portrays the older Docherty as a man who favors caution over outrage. Even as he advises families struck by abuse, he's also trying to resume priestly work in Australia after having been banished in the 1960s for his political beliefs and doesn't want to ruffle his cardinal's feathers. Weaving through the novel is the ongoing case of a victim who refuses the church's current cash settlement and its demand of silence, thus bringing the issue to court and the press. The scenes with the church panel seeking settlementwhich includes the predatory monsignorpoint up the oily eloquence and spiritual clout brought to bear against any further undermining of an edifice already weakened by skepticism and secularism. Most painful are passages in which victims are wooed in the confessional box, a particularly cynical manipulation of youthful guilt and an awful perversion of the Catholic sacrament. Keneally's earnest effort to encompass the many legal and religious facets of this issue unfortunately results in more of an agenda than a novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.