A tale of clerical chess

Bishop’s Move, by Colm Keena (Somerville Press, €14.99 / £12.99)

Joe Carroll

The eponymous Bishop Christopher is hard to keep up with. Within weeks of his consecration as an auxiliary Bishop of Dublin, he has become an atheist, exposed crooked developers and lawyers and left the Church.

Author Colm Keena, a prize-winning Irish Times journalist, has set his first novel during the final stages of the Celtic Tiger frenzy so it has to be fast-moving.  It is also set in and around Archbishop’s House (not ‘Palace’) in Drumcondra where Christopher had been happy doing the diocesan finances until Archbishop Whelan engineered his promotion to succeed a disgraced bishop who had been having annual sexual jaunts to the Philippines.

Not that Christopher is a model bishop himself. He spends a lot of time drinking fines wines, being hung-over and taking taxis around Dublin. He never seems to go into a church, let alone say Mass, or even pray. 

Allegory

While the depiction of the excesses of the Celtic Tiger years are well-portrayed (the author had a role in unravelling them for his newspaper), the clerical world is scarcely credible. 

The plot may perhaps be seen as an allegory of the clash between Good and Evil set against the corruption of the Ireland of the ‘Noughties’.  This could explain the shallowness of the characters. 

Pope Benedict gets a walk-on role when he deplores a physical attack on Christopher which “has become linked with the sudden ominous changes in the economy.

There is widespread talk that there could be a fall, even a sharp fall, in the price of property, with grave consequences,” predicts the Pope. Christopher’s anti-corruption crusade has, unknown to the Holy Father, been contributing to this catastrophe.

Swearing

The Taoiseach of the day, a foul-mouthed mélange of Haughey and Ahern, goes berserk when he realises what Christopher is up to and summons him to Government Buildings to tell him amid much swearing that he will “never work in this town” even if he no longer believes in God. Christopher has no regrets for his sudden loss of faith.

He tells his bewildered archbishop that “I think it was my being made a bishop that brought it to a head…the loss of faith, when it came, was instant and complete, so much so that I find it difficult now to remember what it was like to have ever believed.”