Is it sacrilegious to spill blood on a cassock? Does the amount of time I’ll spend in purgatory depend on how much fell on the priest’s clothes and how much on the floor? Does it make it worse that he was putting away a new supply of communion wafers at the time? I don’t need to tell you I’m in a whole mountain of trouble now, worse than that time when me an’ Mickey nicked off with the collection money from the Little Sisters of the Poor. What would you do if you were in my situation? I mean, I know you’re hardly likely to be committing murder in a church and that, what with you being quite involved with all that craic but a bit of empathy wouldn’t go amiss here.

Ah Jaysus, what with him sprawled out awkwardly in the vestry and this cold as death pew biting at my bones, I don’t really know of it’s helping me talking to you right now. What say we forget the whole damn thing, can we?

It isn’t the most promising of starts, I’ll grant you that. There’s humour, certainly and more than a faint suggestion of a pace-quickening plot about to develop before your eyes, but I must confess, when all the lambs have been counted, it ain’t my pint o’ porter. An Irish Catholic black comedy? I may be only two paragraphs in, but bless my guilty soul, I’m already tired. And there was my good friend Padraic thinking this were the best novel he’d ever set his little pigeon eyes on. That fellow owes me a drink – and don’t I know it.

But what the hell, I thought. I may as well read on. I’m a kind old soul, and I’ll give it another paragraph or two. There was a friend of mine once said to me ‘Sometimes books is like a girl I once loved. You thought you had her pegged, but in truth you never knew where she was going to head off next’. He was right about the girl (a right corker, I’m telling you, but a real loony into the bargain) though I can’t say I’ve ever been sure about the books. The way I sees it, most of the time I can tell exactly where a book is going. Into the wastepaper basket! I make no bones about it – I’m a fussy reader. I wish I wasn’t, but that’s the way it is.  There’s rarely a book deserves the true fullness of my attention. And The Dead Priest was not about to be an exception, not by St. Christopher’s rucksack it wasn’t. At the start of the third paragraph I was already stretching my throwing arm, preparing to launch this nonsense clean across the room and into the old rubbish n' litter bin.

The choice of words, as it happens, was not accidental:

By the saints, I’m beginning to wish I’d never set foot on that rocket thirteen years ago. Missionary work is all very well and noble I’m telling you, but by Veronica’s shawl, I promise you, I can’t say I’d bargained for the climate up here. Somehow I always reckoned on the aliens having invented a superior form of fire, such as could be used underwater. Nobody told me they had such thick skins.

Ah, but tell me, what choice did I have? The abbot was on my case, that’s for sure. He had his suspicions, god knows he did. It must’ve been the diamond cross I’d been wearing. I never should’ve bought such an thing, but on account of my crippling guilt I had to spend the stolen money on something religious like (it was either that or a leather habit). What’s more, I could have sworn the abbot saw me kissing that nun the night before.

More than a decade in space I’ve been now – but it was almost worth it for that one smacker.
 

I stopped reading. Blimey o’riley, I thought – what in heaven’s name is going on here? First we’ve got this fellow in a church with a dead priest – now we’ve the same fellow jabbering on about missionary work in space. In space? You’re having a laugh, I said aloud. You cannot keep this up, O’Droningham, heaven knows you can’t.

But bless my soul, he does. He keeps it up, by god he keeps it up. And how.

I take it back. It cannot come down to a single smacker. By Jerome’s beard, I’m not romantic as all that. I wouldn’t sell my soul for a single kiss, not even with a saucy nun. Ah, but I’ve been spoilt, I tell you. These alien women are enough to drive any monk wild. And those thick skins of theirs come in handy, what with my inability to commit to a long term relationship (it’s a terrible disease, I’ll have you know, but bless my soul I can’t do a thing about it). Would you know it, some of them even have more than two…

Ah, but there’s plenty of time for that talk later on. What would St. Columban have thought!

Bless you O’Droningham: your hoover of prose has sucked me in like the meaningless bit of fluff I am. I am lost in the silky maze of your plot, swimming in the splendour of it all, like a seahorse in an ocean of Guinness. Your characters have leapt like crickets from the pages of your book and taken up residence in my mind. I only have to close my eyes to see a three breasted alien woman in discourse with Seamus O’Solly over St. Columban’s criticisms of the Burgundian court, or to relive your riotous passage describing the distribution of communion in zero gravity. Bless you, O’Droningham. Your mix of murder mystery, science fiction, Catholic theology and sex farce is a hoot, by heaven it is. I didn’t think you could keep it up, but by Beckett’s forehead you did, right to the very last word.

This is what I thought, having finished the book in question. I thought this once, I thought this twice – and here I am thinking it again. Bless you O’Droningham.

Of course, you’ll be needing my blessings. I mean, it’s all very well and good for your average man to write such stuff, but what with you being a monk and all, there’s some thinking you won’t have been attracting praise from all quarters. What am I saying? I know you haven’t been attracting praise. I hear that the Pope wasn’t so impressed (prefers his comic books, I’m told). Nor so the old abbot of St. Benedict’s. No, the old abbot didn’t like it at all, did he? Didn’t like the thought of this filth being written at his own dear monastery. And I can see what he was thinking of, that I can do. By Joyce’s spectacles, I can certainly see what he was thinking of. I mean, it isn’t really a monk’s place to be writing about lustful encounters with long-legged aliens, is it now? Nor for that matter to be imagining the bloody murder of a member of the order. To give you your due, you’re certainly keen on the life of St. Columban, and never entirely disrespectful of the Catholic faith, but by the saints, you don’t shirk away from unholy topics either. It’s no damn wonder that your fellow monks have been gassing left right and centre about this book of his. Honest to god, the whole business makes your head spin faster than a, than a, than a…

Leprechaun on a Merry-Go-Round? Four leafed clover owner? Blarney stone kisser?

That’s it – I’m all out of pseudo-Irish speak. I can’t bear it any longer. Leave it to the professionals, that’s what I say. Leave it to O’Droningham. Now there’s a man well acquainted with the lingo. As for me, I’ll resort to the patois of the scholar: the elegant phrasing and anaesthetisingly incomprehensible utilization of language.

It was two years ago I visited the monastery of St. Benedict’s in County Down, Ireland. I had just finished The Dead Priest, Ciambhal O’Droningham’s unbelievably brilliant novel and, determined to mine toward to the posterior of its lustre, I sought out the author. He was a monk, I knew this. The fly leaf of the novel told me as much. But how was it that a monk had published this work – crammed as it was with coarse laughter, comfortable slaughter and creative sex? I knew all about Alexis Pathenikolides - the shy virginal ex-chartered accountant who had written The Twisted Olive Tree - but this was a completely different kettle of fish. O’Droningham was still a monk: it wasn’t as if he’d forsaken the order. No, he merely wrote a book about killing a priest, stealing money from poor boxes and making love to aliens when employed to teach them the word of god. He merely created the character of Seamus O’Solly, one of the most immoral yet undeniably charming monks in the history of literature. What was wrong with that? Show me a monk who doesn’t dream that kind of thing up in his spare time. Show me a monk who hasn’t ever thought of setting up a monastery on one of Jupiter’s moons in the year 2200.

St. Benedict’s doesn’t take too kindly to literary critics. The abbot no doubt resents interest in O’Droningham, of whom he is unsurprisingly suspicious. Nevertheless, in the name of Christian charity I am allowed in, so long as I agree not to besmirch the name of, well, Christian charity. Otherwise I am permitted to interview O’Droningham in peace.

The conversation takes place in the writer’s cell – his bedroom cum study – which contains only a bed, a chair, a desk and a crucifix hanging on one of three plain white walls. The view from a small circular window on the fourth wall – hills, trees, pale sun bouncing off monastery walls - is no more than pleasant. It reminds me, naturally, of another circular window, the one through which Seamus O’Solly remembers staring whilst on the spaceship bound for St. Ganarkán’s monastery on Europa. His view was much better: ‘in front of me hung the moon Ganymede; beyond that Callisto’ (The Dead Priest, p52). I reflect on further dissimilarities between O’Solly, the raffish, lustily overenthusiastic and criminally challenged narrator of The Dead Priest and O’Droningham, the quiet, well-spoken and humble author of the same book. The succulence of these contrasts is the source of all that is good in The Dead Priest: the glorious juxtaposition of two wildly disparate traditions – the long standing tradition of the monastery; its quiet cloisters, austere lifestyle and simply dressed inhabitants; with the much more recent tradition of space travel; its high-tech computers, glistening metallic spacecraft and ultra-modern impenetrable bug-headed spacesuits.

 But first, to deal with the similarities. For all his skirt-chasing and instinct to murder, O’Solly is also that most dangerous of things: an amateur academic. He is working on a critical companion to his ‘hero’ St. Columban - the 6th century Irish missionary who once tangled with French bishops over the calculation of Easter. So too, as it happens, is O’Droningham. In fact, The Dead Priest owes its existence to frustrations arising from the failure to complete his work on the said saint. ‘It was a matter of concentration,’ he told me, following a lengthy (and in my view unnecessary) discourse on the temptations of St. Anthony. ‘Dedicated as I was to St. Columban – and to my duties as a monk – I found it hard to concentrate on this one topic every day. My mind strayed, invariably, to other things’. Other things? I mused. Well, all of our minds stray to other things. But groping with alien women and assassinating members of the clergy? Those aren’t just other things, surely? Then again, maybe you need to have been a monk for thirty odd years to understand what we’re talking about here (which is why I gave him the benefit of the doubt on this point).

‘So The Dead Priest was your response to this matter of concentration?’ I asked. He nodded sagely, his brown habit flapping over his forehead. ‘In short, yes,’ he said: ‘The book is very much a product of this problem, if not the solution to it’. It was now my turn to nod sagely: a feat which I cannot say with confidence that I managed (it simply wasn’t my habit). ‘Now I understand the concept of lessening unwanted desires through writing about them,’ I responded, ‘but I’m not altogether sure how you arrived at the idea of a monastery in space’. O’Droningham chanced a mischievous smile (with more than a flicker of his alter-ego). ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘like many monks, I’ve always felt an affinity with astronauts. There are the odd differences, granted, but essentially we’re looking at the same sort of thing. Both vocations require thoughtfulness, intelligence and, most of all, the ability to spend hours and hours with very little company and very little noise, in a very small space’. I must confess that I had never before had the vision to consider this comparison. A thought occurred to me: ‘Has anyone ever had intercourse in space?’ I asked. The monk elevated an eyebrow, before admitting that his research had not thrown up the evidence required to answer that query, though he imagined that astronauts were indeed, whilst in space, consigned to celibacy. ‘Would you say then,’ I persisted, ‘that science, tending as it does to look beyond religion, has in itself become a sort of god? That astronauts are, as a result, the monks of science?’ O’Droningham rubbed his right eye with carefully moderated passion. ‘What I would say,’ he said, ‘is that a metaphor, like a hunk of toffee, can only be stretched so far’.

The conversation then took a left turn or two, before arriving back on a track not dissimilar to that on which we had already travelled. St. Columban had been the sole population of these diverting byways and, despite his significance as the original vehicle of the text in hand, I was somewhat reluctant to dwell on him. It was the science-fiction aspect of the story that interested me most. From what sources, I wondered, had this retiring monk gathered his extensive yet esoteric knowledge of modern astronomy? His relatively long-winded reply suggested that whilst he had read widely on the subject, he had also left a wide expanse of space in which to scatter the stars of an overactive imagination. It was into this last category, I surmised, that we should file his aliens – a conclusion with which he readily agreed, acknowledging the fact that his extra-terrestrials owed little to keen scientific reasoning, and a lot more to the concept of distorting the human form for comic effect. On the other hand, he was open to the possibilities that such creatures might exist outside of our own solar system (from where his own aliens do in fact beckon, their existence on Europa owing to the fact that their own planet – Herät - was was getting steadily warmer and they hadn’t yet invented suntan lotion). Nevertheless, if aliens of this sort were discovered, he doubted that Catholic missionaries would be on the scene with quite as much speed as they are in this case, nor that Seamus O’Solly – an unbelievably poor example of a missionary – would be taking the risk of procreating with a foreign species without at first considering the repercussions. ‘But such,’ said O’Droningham, ‘are the joys of fiction. It doesn’t have to make complete sense’.

The joys of fiction indeed. Therein lies the problem. Respectable monk that is, O’Droningham seems to be having far too much fun with fiction. Of course, Jesus was not adverse to the power of story-telling himself, but he at least concluded his tales with a spiritual message. The only message that I can gleam from The Dead Priest is that clergymen with a habit of overrunning on their sermons should expect to be murdered and that alien women should readily cross their legs when confronted with errant monks. Maybe we aren’t encouraged to empathise with O’Solly (granted, his charm does get a bit wearing as the novel goes on) but we are hardly driven to remonstrate with the way that he lives. For all that O’Droningham has used the book to exorcise his deepest desires, he does not appear to have flagged up the dangers involved for the rest of us. Personally speaking, this does not irk me - I am quite unperturbed when it comes to reading about sin without experiencing guilt – but in view of O’Droningham’s position, others have shown themselves to be less content. No one doubts that the writing of The Dead Priest had a cathartic effect on its author; but a fair amount of concern has been rightly reserved for his readers. Will they accept that reading about sex and murder is a fair equivalent to taking part in it, or will O’Droningham’s story encourage them to indulge in either of these ancient pastimes?

Though the man himself likes to play down any sort of bad influence his work may be having on younger monks (or even those outside of the order) there are signs that he will not be able to eschew the issue for much longer. After my interview with O’Droningham, I found myself in conversation with another member of St. Benedict’s monastery who was keen to know whether I had heard anything of a young monk who had disappeared some months earlier. I explained that the world outside of the monastery was probably larger than he imagined and that, no, I hadn’t come across this figure of which he spoke. This was a pity, remarked the monk, for he had been eager to know whether or not the rumours were true. What rumours? I asked. The monk explained that the young man had revealed during a confession that he had been contemplating leaving the monastery and heading off to America to work for NASA where he hoped to engage in a mixture of ‘inter-planetary and inter-sexual explorations’. Following his disappearance, it was presumed that he had put this plan into action. I promised to keep my eye out on the fellow, to whom I had already warmed. Nonetheless, I was anxious as to the repercussions that this story would have on O’Droningham, whose dangerous fiction already lacked support within the clerical community. He would protest, I was sure, but what kind of case did he have? The incidents were surely related and he was, it could be said, indirectly responsible for turning this chap from the pleasures of the spiritual to those of the corporeal. Was he seriously underestimating the dangerous power of his own words? O’Droningham seemed to me to be curiously vague on this point. He praised the ability of words to substitute for his inhibited desires, but denied that these same words could release other people’s. I sense that he was labouring under the misinterpretation that, because he had written the novel with good intentions, it would be read with good intentions. On the contrary, I suspect that he has achieved the inversion of Chaucer’s Pardoner – the sinner whose honeyed words converted many, though his heart was never in it. O’Droningham, unlike the protagonist of his book, is no naughty monk. But is the concealed morality of his story so well concealed that it risks spawning a generation of naughty monks? Has he neglected the fact that sin, in all its immorality, is at heart an attractive venture? The answer to this is no – he knows full well that O’Solly is an alluring character and that his sinful deeds are both endlessly amusing and pleasant to imagine – he merely supposes that his readers will be content with their imaginings alone. He is helped in this regard by the manner in which he has exaggerated his desires (for all the young monk’s efforts, one suspects that space travel and alien sex are neither of them easy hobbies to take up) but even so he is playing a hazardous game (murdering a priest, now I think of it, would be an easier task). All in all, one cannot help asking, should a monk even be imagining such things? O’Droningham thinks that the twenty-first century monk ought to embrace his dirty thoughts, so long as they help him to resist progression towards dirty actions: other monks are happier to stick with a more traditional viewpoint. Monk as I am not, I shall resist the temptation to take any further part in this argument. Rest assured, it is proceeding towards the beginning of coming to a head. We shall hear more of this, one imagines.

    No matter what the final outcome is, my thoughts will remain consistent: Bless you O’Droningham. Regardless of whether you turn out to be a naughty monk in the end, or a spiritual saviour, I will always value your incredible contribution to literature. And if the abbot of St. Benedict’s should nudge you out of the monastery doors into the deep space of the secular universe, I should welcome your expunging your fantasies on a more regular basis, for all of our sakes. St. Columban might not have been impressed, but by his own relics, he’d almost certainly not have been able to suppress a mischievous grin.

Review by Michael Rosinith