The Deposition of Father McGreevy

Rating:
Summary: Nearly flawless storytelling
Review: I adore Booker Prize winners and shortlisted titles. I'm rarely disappointed though each work is unique. O'Doherty wrote a work that celebrates the profound good one truly pious man accomplishes. The story will break your heart. The good suffer.

Rating:
Summary: The power of rumor, fear, and moral rigidity.
Review: The sad, inexorable decline of a tiny, remote village of the Dingle Peninsula on the southern tip of Ireland is the framework for this affecting and engrossing Booker Award nominee. Setting his novel in one of the most inhospitable places on earth for farming, with its almost bare, rocky outcroppings, a thin cover of grass, and slopes more easily negotiated by mountain goats than men, O'Doherty presents tough villagers coping with the most basic problems of life, death, and survival. Father McGreevy, the local priest to a congregation of fewer than twenty people, is being deposed as part of an investigation into the deaths of all five wives and one of the men in the village during a particularly harsh winter, which completely isolated the village from the town. Long-standing conflicts between village and town are obvious.

In fluid, almost lyrical, prose O'Doherty creates characters the reader cares about, while showing their limitations and "blemishes," as they deal with the conflicts. The suspense becomes almost palpable as details of the harsh winter are revealed, and rumors spreading throughout the town stretch the patience of the villagers to the breaking point. As events spiral to their inevitable conclusion, the reader becomes trapped in the same whirlwind that sweeps up the practical villagers and experiences their same sense of desolation and loss. This is a sensitive portrayal of the harshest of lives, and at the conclusion the reader is uncertain whether any single event could have changed the outcome.

Rating:
Summary: lyrical, gripping and raw
Review: This is an original and fascinating story of an isolated Irish village which suffers a series of tragedies during the early forties that leads to its demise. A caring priest tells the tale of a terrible winter during which the five young women of the village die. This tragedy casts suspicions on the occupants of the village from the larger community at the bottom of the mountain, suspicions which continue to be fed by the primitive behavior of a damaged young man. The destruction and cruelties that result from innuendo and rumor build and begin to impact the good men of the village. An absorbing, wonderfully written story set in a bleak but fascinating time and place.