The book is not always satisfying, but the interest of the material—time travel! music-induced trances! astral projection!...
An ecclesiastical thriller based on the legend of the Lady in Blue, an apparition said to have prepared indigenous Americans for the arrival of the conquistadores and their missionary Catholicism.
Sierra’s latest work (The Secret Supper, 2006, was his first published in the U.S.) will again spark comparisons to Dan Brown. The novel features, among others, nuns able to project themselves long distances and occupy two spaces simultaneously; a journalist propelled by mysterious “coincidences” to investigate a mysterious entity, the Lady in Blue; a young American woman with psychic gifts who’s plagued by detailed, persistent dreams; and an Italian priest and music professor long engaged in a shadowy Vatican project called Chronovision that derives from the idea that “harmony was capable of provoking altered states of consciousness that permitted priests and initiates…access to ‘superior’ realms of reality.” Sierra mixes fact and fiction adeptly but tendentiously, and sometimes seems less a novelist than a polemicist intent on fashioning mysticism into pseudoscience. The prose and characters can be wooden, the fictional accoutrements crude, but Sierra makes it all entertaining, intermixing history, churchly intrigue, folklore, spycraft, musicology and conspiracy journalism to amusing, if not always plausible, effect—and all of it moving toward a surprising conclusion.
The book is not always satisfying, but the interest of the material—time travel! music-induced trances! astral projection! larcenous angels with code names and walkie-talkies!—wins out in the end.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3223-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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