From Publishers Weekly
In a work as compelling as his Booker-shortlisted Lies of Silence , Moore tells a swift, spellbinding tale of faith and politics that is plainly based on recent events in Haiti, whose priest/president Aristide is still in exile. The priest/president of Moore's fictional Ganae is Jeannot, a brilliant black boy plucked from rural poverty by the Canadian missionary who tells the story. Jeannot becomes a highly charismatic priest, draws an enormous following from among the poor and becomes enmeshed, inevitably, in island politics as an outspoken enemy of the corrupt army, the mulatto elite, drug dealers and American business interests. As a priest, he also becomes embroiled with Rome (since, as a cynical fellow priest remarks, "Liberation theology is out of date. This is a capitalist world and we have to live in it.") The issue of whether a priest has a duty to help the poor in their material lives or simply to concentrate on their immortal souls is at the heart of the novel, but it is by no means a didactic affair; for one thing, Jeannot is created with real passion. Written with great speed and economy, but with a strikingly brooding atmosphere, the narrative hastens to an enigmatic and mournful conclusion. This is the best writing Moore has done in many years, and certainly bears comparison with that other 20th-century classic about Haiti, Graham Greene's The Comedians.
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From Kirkus Reviews
A Catholic priest presents the parable of the rise and fall (or is it an apotheosis?) of a charismatic statesman and holy man--an ambiguous contemporary messiah--on a poor, deeply troubled West Indian island. After taking in the orphaned Jean-Pierre Cantave from the poor hamlet of Toumalie, Father Paul Michel, a Canadian missionary to the island of Ganae, acquiesces in the boy's request to be ordained abroad as a priest himself, watches Jeannot (as Father Paul calls him) return under the banner of liberation theology, and then sees him expelled from his order and relieved of his parish duties, only to emerge as the overwhelmingly popular choice for president after the death of the brutal dictator Jean-Marie Doumergue. When Jeannot, who repeatedly invokes the example of Christ in his speeches (their cadence as well as their subjects) and in his actions, seems to be following Doumergue into tyranny--surrounding himself with a cadre of close followers, refusing to share power with the opposition, staging show trials for symbolic ``oppressors,'' and dramatizing his mandate by fomenting continual demonstrations on the government's behalf--the church fathers threaten to excommunicate him. In response, he walks a fine line between political accommodation and self-justification through the mantra of ``the poor''--leaving even his loyal mentor Father Paul doubtful about his true loyalties. So far, we could almost be reading a recent history of Haiti; but when the long-awaited military coup against Jeannot comes, he meets it with a climactically Christlike stroke that's unprecedented in Haitian politics or political fiction generally. Moore's gift (Lies of Silence, 1990, etc.) for framing volatile political and religious questions in terms of particular human experience has never been taken to such extraordinary lengths as in this brief, ambitious, deeply unsettling novel. --
Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
