The Mean Streets

Saturday, February 11, 2006

The Sixth Lamentation*

by William Brodrick

Viking

ISBN 0-670-03191-7

Hardcover  $24.95

July 2003

 

*Also available in paperback

 

(I saw this book recently on a bargain rack at one of our local bookstores. I know that I reviewed it when it first came out in hardcover but I don’t believe that review was ever published. In any event, this one is worth picking up. It’s also a novel I figured would make a bigger “splash” than it did. Shows what I know!).

 

 

Labeled a “literary thriller” by its publisher, William Brodrick’s The Sixth Lamentation will captivate you no matter how you ultimately classify it. Revenge, betrayal, loyalty, faith and, most significantly, redemption all play a part in a book that will provoke and haunt you long after you have closed its pages.

 

The novel features dual story lines that interweave and, indeed, eventually collide in shocking and affecting ways. It’s 1995 and Edward Schwermann, an alleged Nazi war criminal who has been exposed, seeks sanctuary at an Augustinian monastery (Lakewood Priory) in Great Britain. The negative publicity attending Schwermann’s arrival at Lakewood – and the hullabaloo of an imminent war crimes trial coincidentally set to begin in the UK – forces the ecclesiastical authorities to launch an investigation of their own. Father Anselm, a former barrister-turned-monk, seems like just the man for the job. As the priest probes the dark history of the German occupation of Paris during World War II and the subsequent ‘relocation” of hundreds of thousands of French Jews to the camps in the East, he makes a disturbing discovery; this is apparently not the first time that the church has come to Schwermann’s rescue. Anselm learns that, back in 1944, Catholic authorities helped the German officer escape France and assisted him in establishing a new identity in England. His recent arrival on the priory doorstep seems less happenstance than it does something virtually preordained. Do Anselm’s superiors thus want the monk to unearth the truth or abet yet another cover-up?

 

Meanwhile in London, the elderly Agnes Embleton lays dying from motor neuron disease. As the old woman’s condition worsens, and before her inevitable dissolution, she imparts a momentous secret to her twenty-five-year-old granddaughter, Lucy. During her youth in Paris, Agnes was part of a resistance group known as the “Round Table” which worked to smuggle Jewish children out of France. The group was betrayed by one of its own members working in collaboration with – you guessed it – an SS Officer by the name of Edward Schwermann. One of the casualties of that betrayal was Agnes’ infant son, Robert. Anselm and Lucy cross paths as they both seek to make sense of the present by coming to grips with the past. The pair soon discovers that no one and no thing – good, bad or indifferent – is quite what it seems and that human motivation never, ever operates strictly on one level alone.

 

No brief summary could even begin to do justice to the dense and complex plot of The Sixth Lamentation. This is a novel that will require lots of time, effort and attention on the part of the reader. But it’s also a novel that will repay that effort with insight and understanding over and over again in the course of its pages. What Brodrick has accomplished here is a moving reflection on the power of evil, the tragedy of human weakness and, finally, on the redeeming power of time and self-sacrifice. The author’s prose is lucent and, in places, even transcendent:

 

“Agnes could no longer lift her arms or head … Everyone diligently fussed over her needs, not realizing that she didn’t care … For within the heavens were lit by repeated explosions of fireworks, with every shade of blue and green and yellow and red, splintering into trillions of gleaming particles against a vast stream of silver, dancing stars. They fell as a shower upon her raised head, onto her lashes, balancing precariously on each curved, counted hair, before tumbling joyously over her, into the abyss beneath, where she would soon follow after the reunion with Robert that would surely come.”

 

Novels this good … and which are this good on so many levels … are like rare, costly gifts. They are, as Brodrick writes, like “ … timeless, enduring, secret benedictions.”

 

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