FICTION: Thomas Kenneally's latest novel in what has been a prodigious output is a strangely old-fashioned affair. The cover would have you believe that it is a World War two take on The Thornbirds, Colleen McCulloch's steamy 1970s "what the bishop did" bestseller.
It shows a Mills and Boon close-up of a couple's kiss, the woman's hand prominently displaying a wedding ring with a titillating caption - what drives some to God, some to adultery and others to kill?
Not that the author can in any way be blamed for this misrepresentation of what is a serious and sober exploration of one priest's struggle with his calling. The unsuspecting reader, though, should know that The Office of Innocence is more Graham Greene than Andrew Greally.
For anyone who has read Keneally's memoir, Homebush Boy, about a year in the author's Catholic adolescence, this novel could be seen as a sort of sequel. The main character, Father Frank Darragh, is much like the young man portrayed in Keneally's memoir - romantic, earnest, pious, scrupulously guilty and shockingly innocent. The Office of Innocence takes up the fictional baton where Homebush Boy left off - when the 17-year-old Keneally enters the seminary (he spent six years at St Patrick's College in Sydney before leaving, just weeks before ordination).
Writing earlier this year in the New Yorker about the current tide of sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, Keneally drew a pen picture of his own sexuality on entering the priesthood. "I was full of what could be called sexual wonderings rather than direct sexual experience, and the sacrifice involved in undertaking priestly celibacy seemed a minor issue, particularly since I would be surrounded by other men to whom sexual abstinence was the heroic norm."
Though it is odious to ascribe too much autobiographical impulse to what is clearly a novel, the preceding high-mindedness could well belong to Father Darragh, newly ordained curate at St Margaret's, in the Sydney suburb of Strathfield in 1942, the year the novel opens. Australia is at war, Singapore has fallen to the Japanese and Sydney is bracing itself for the "yellow peril". The city is full of American soldiers, and the wives of Australian soldiers fighting in the East.
One such woman, Kate Heggarty whose husband is a POW, comes to the young curate with a moral dilemma. An American soldier has been visiting her and bringing much needed food parcels for her and her small son. Although nothing improper has happened between them, she is not naive enough to believe that the soldier will not eventually want something in return.
Father Darragh takes on Mrs Heggarty's case with a missionary zeal, intent on saving both her soul and her reputation. She is driven by a secular pragmatism - she is concerned with material survival and the dignity which that will afford her and her child. Father Darragh, out of personal inexperience and the conviction of his own beliefs, insists that she must remain spiritually pure. What Father Darragh does not acknowledge, though, are his own feelings for Mrs Heggarty. His is an incoherent kind of desire, only barely alluded to, because he is barely aware of it himself.
When Mrs Heggarty is found strangled, Father Darragh, who has been spending time counselling her, becomes a suspect. Subsequently, Mrs Heggarty's killer confesses his crime to Father Darragh and from then on, the novel changes tone. There are echoes of "I Confess" - the classic film noir thriller - as Father Darragh attempts to bypass the seal of the confessional and there's a tense showdown between priest and killer during a suspected invasion by the Japanese of Sydney harbour.
Keneally has always been, first and foremost, a storyteller and he remains true to his populist roots as The Office of Innocence swerves from an introspective study of a character in crisis to a straightforward whodunnit. There is some narrative justification for this switch as Father Darragh emerges from his high-flown abstraction into the dirty world of men's deeds. But Keneally's careful and compelling construction of the young priest's interior struggle gets sacrificed in the end to the demands of neat plotting.
The Office of Innocence captures beautifully the recklessness of wartime. Kenneally lovingly recreates too the dim claustraphobia of the 1940s, the dark dusty presbyteries and the smoky drinking dens, as well as the gothic richness of church rituals. He's very good on the clerical wardrobe - the jaunty birettas, the encrusted stoles - a nostalgic treat for the lapsed Catholic.
But ultimately, The Office of Innocence disappoints. Perhaps because its subject is so deeply unfashionable - an innocent priest - but mostly because it starts out as a boy's own story and ends up as a Boy's Own tale.
Mary Morrissy is a writer and critic.
The Office of Innocence. By Thomas Keneally. Sceptre 336 pp. £17.99