IIn 1474, in a fictional location in Southern Europe, Father Alberto arrives from Jormel Abbey, where he has failed in his ambition to become a manuscript illuminator in its famous scriptorium. He is the new parish priest of the villages of Hem and Long, whose congregants are generally “piebald and misguided”, but not the most strange or refractory of their flock. Among his duties is to care for the mentally afflicted of the Convent of St. Particular, the patron saint of the disfavored, who are confined in cells for most of the year. The fearsome Abbess and silent Sister Lorenza introduce Alberto to her charges using the Index, an annotated manuscript of prisoners whose strange minds are “completely filled”. These include Peter Mastiff, an angry, blasphemous carpenter; Selina, essentially naked and unapologetically sexual; Karin Marina, a former princess who has a secret; Malike Dayne, who has a map of the “topography of the known universe” inscribed on his body; Zanzibar, a suicide horse; and a mute girl wrapped in rags who “uselessly attempts to fly”. These are just some of the wide range of characters in a fable-like novel that skillfully combines amusing comedy with serious moral themes.
At the end of each summer comes the Feast of the Holy Fool, a festival of debauchery that features curses, drunkenness, violence, and acts of sexual debauchery. The mad are left to roam freely, but the priest has to return them to their cells with the aid of his eccentric and resourceful sexton, Oblong. The most challenging to retrieve is Flying Girl, which moves on foot over the ground and through the treetops. She speaks in “a cavalcade of light and sonorous gibberish” that is probably birdsong.
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Alberto displayed immediate sympathy for the mad, telling Sister Lorenza: “I am saddened that all those poor souls are imprisoned in St. Speciale on a large scale because there Not a good name for what they are. What if here…we began a Christian study of madness? He devises innovations to help the prisoners recover more humanely after days of feasting: singing to the horse, which allows him to stop; appeasing Peter by allowing him to use his skills in repairing the church; To capture Selina, with the oblong, wrinkled and dressing in a veil, who finds comfort in the presence of nuns. The abbot is furious: “You imagine crude salvation for the weak because of some arrogant arrogance…God made us perfect!…Immutable! He did not make any of us puzzles!”
The novel is organized around a progressive set of “instructions for an as-yet-unrelated book”: an illustrated book of Angelou’s life told retrospectively 10 years before the main narrative. It is a consistently successful and engaging device, highlighting the story and its themes clearly and often cleverly. “Recto. Wooden church. With an elevated heart I looked at the simple and gently curved spire, situated in a gloomy valley. It was not inconceivable that I should be able to do good works here.”
Father Alberto is a moral fable in which madness is revealed as, in Alberto’s words, “a plume of uncertainty around which a form of normality swirls”, distracting sane people from uncomfortable questions about the nature of reality. The attack sets kindness and grace in clear opposition to the abuse of power and the failure of human empathy. This novel is gratifyingly absorbing, with well-paced, sometimes violent, action and a carefully unfolding plot, hinting at larger mysteries outside the margins of the story. As Alberto concludes: “The truth is too great, and comes too slowly for our swift little lives… It is also so glorious and diverse, and so manifold, that we can ever be but a small part of the totality.”
