Christy Kenneally is an oddity.
I mean that in the best sense of the
word: although he has presented a large number of television
documentaries and travel shows (RTE's No Frontiers for example), this
Cork man with the highly individual voice is a most unlikely TV
celebrity.
For one thing he is an ex-priest (which must
have been a help in writing three thrillers featuring a detective
called Father Flaherty); for another thing he's essentially a scholar
with a deep knowledge of European cultures.
All of these
characteristics, except the Irishness, get a good run-out in this new
novel, the first part of a trilogy aimed at the international market.
It
is the story of Max Steiger and Karl Hamner growing up in a small
village in Austria and falling in love with Elsa, a bright and
independent young woman.
Although World War Two
has started -- the book begins in 1940 -- it hasn't yet transformed
their lives.
But when Elsa dies brutally, Max flees to Zagreb in
Croatia and soon thereafter Karl is conscripted into the Nazi army.
Max becomes a priest, after a single day of instruction. And Karl is caught up in the invasion of Russia.
That
world-changing event, Operation Barbarossa, takes the story to another
level. Kenneally concentrates on how the Vatican, in particular Pope
Pius XII and the forceful French Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, deal with
the invasion and, later, with the deportation of Rome's Jews.
In
the fiction, the Biblically bearded Tisserant doesn't think the pope is
up to the job. It's hard to disagree: although Pope Pius was pious,
an innocent mammy's boy, he was less interested in the Gospel than the
government of the church, blind to evil, cold to suffering.
The blindness could be comic: the German advance on the Soviet Union
presented an opportunity, in the pope's mind, for sending in priests
to evangelise the newly conquered peoples of central Europe. Never
mind the chaos, let's do the conversions.
The indifference to
suffering brings Kenneally to his other main theme: the destruction of
half a million Orthodox Christian Serbs by the Ustashe fascists in
Croatia.
This is a story that is probably little-known to Irish
readers, but though it's complicated, it's also amazingly horrible.
This
reader, for example, was inclined to disbelieve Kenneally's depiction
of a Franciscan who delights in butchering men, women and children.
But there was such a priest, Fra Filipovic, and after the war he was
hanged for his crimes.
While Max is not in the same class as the
Franciscan, he is not much better.
And his connection to Cardinal
Aloysius Stepinac allows the reader an insight into another
fascinating historical character.
Cardinal Stepinac, imprisoned
after the war by the communists, was a fascist sympathiser -- and yet
the Vatican beatified him and he was undoubtedly a friend to the Jews.
Karl,
too, has historical connections. He gets close to General Kluge, the
leader of the invasion, who later plotted to kill Hitler and when the
plot failed killed himself.
All of this makes no mention of a
host of other characters and other sub-plots.
There's Edwin Unger, for
instance, a German spy behind the Russian lines who murders and gets
murdered.
And Frau Mende, a herbalist who feeds Max a potion that
knocks him out and prevents him being questioned about Elsa's
disappearance.
Then there are substantial roles for a huge variety
of important Soviet leaders, including Stalin, Marshal Zhukov and the
hideous Lavrenty Beria,
who in his spare time trawled the night-time streets of Moscow for
women.
As Kenneally puts it: "Whether they stepped or were dragged
into the official limousine was immaterial to Beria."
The
Betrayed is 432 pages long, and there are five pages of biographical
notes on the historical players, and yet it's still bursting at the
seams with information.
But while the facts are always intensely
interesting, the fiction is inclined to sink into melodrama.
The
characters also tend to speak as if they are reciting from a history
book -- Tisserant, for example, hardly needs to tell the pope that
Angelo Roncalli, the future John XXIII, "is our nuncio in Istanbul".
All
in all, one is left with the impression that Kenneally would be more
comfortable if he wasn't so keen on informing and entertaining the
uneducated reader. But if that's a sin, it's an odd one.