The Conduct of Saints
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The Conduct of Saints is a battleground on which power, God, sex, and the Devil collide in the impoverished city of Rome during May and June of 1945. The German occupation of the Eternal City has ended, the war in Europe is over, the Bomb has yet to fall on Japan, and Rome is under the jurisdiction of the victors - the American, British, and French Allied Control Commission.
An American Vatican prelate and lawyer, Brendan Doherty, is involved in two crusades. With his horror of capital punishment, he means to avert the execution of the Nazi collaborator Pietro Koch. As Devil's Advocate, Doherty intends also to prove the hypocrisy of Alessandro Serenelli, the man who, forty years before, murdered the child martyr, soon to be canonized Maria Goretti. Converted by a vision, Serenelli has spent his life, in prison and out, in promotion of the beatification of his victim.
Memory-tormented, hard-drinking, a moral street fighter for what he is sure is right, both angry and compassionate, Doherty feels guilt for having done too little to save the city's Jews from Auschwitz. He engages in his causes and quarrels with Rome's pre-dolce vita, postwar society - people both fictional and, like Alessandro Serenelli, Maria Goretti, Pietro Koch, Pius XII, and film director Luchino Visconti, historical - until the priest comes to a reckoning with himself and with the serene, unshakeable saint-maker Serenelli.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There is no easy way into this National Book Award nominated author's latest novel (for A Peep Into the 20th Century), a historical narrative set in the initial year of Allied-occupied Rome. Dense language, political heft, and teasing secrets hold the reader as one follows alcoholic American priest Brendan Doherty in pursuit of his two goals: to discover Alessandro Serenelli's role in the martyrdom of Maria Goretti whom he raped and murdered and to save the life of the condemned Nazi collaborator Pietro Koch (who tortured and murdered thousands). As Davis grapples with the morality of capital punishment, he also explores issues of faith and forgiveness, and more modern topics like sexuality and the ways suppressed emotions creates martyrs of their own. The vivid environment of post-war Rome seems to have saints around every turn, a stark contrast to the detailed accounts of the Vatican's complicity in the holocaust. Despite prose that can be frustratingly oblique, and too many scenes of dialogue-as-exposition set in cafes or bars, the culmination of the trial, execution, and the resulting aftermath leaves the reader with a haunting sense of the past informing our present that only the best historical fiction hopes to achieve.
