Give judgment for me, O God

THRILLS AND REVERENCE IN TANDEM

GERARD Charles Wilson has written a novel of epic scope set in contrasting locations. First, the Victorian country - town, Binawarra, dominated by a peak known to the locals as Death Rock. Second, Middelburg in the Dutch Province of Zeeland, dominated by the eponymous castle on Walcheren.

The sinister, bitter character linking these locations is Gerda Vrouwendijk who arrives at the Binawarra High School disguised as Edith Bicknell, multi-lingual teacher with specialist qualifications in student counselling.

She is taken at face value by the genial, hardworking headmaster Bill Huckerby and his charming wife Joanne. But Vrouwendijk/Bicknell has more in mind than counselling unruly students. She has a specific target: one of the students, Estella Winterbine, beautiful and of formidable virtue, closely protected by her parents, the local carpenter Charles Winterbine, and his wife, the angelic, blue-eyed Aine (nee O'Riordan).

In these three, the author essays one of the most difficult tasks in literature: the portrayal of goodness, even saintliness. To assist them, he creates the tough-minded, incomer Englishwoman Florence Barker, trailing hints of having worked for the secret service, and the crippled Dutch priest, Father Jos van Engelen, whose work included service in New Guinea with an order not unlike the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart.

He is also cross-linked to a post-World War II episode with Vrouwendijk in which the defeated Nazi opened fire on civilians.

Ingeniously, Wilson shows how the hidden currents, hostilities and petty snobberies beneath the benign surface of a town like Binawarra can be manipulated by a person of ill-will, especially one like Vrouwendijk/Bicknell, to blackmail the local newspaper editor. She is backed by Boris, a mercenary with Balkan-Muslim connections and the influence of a rich and covert international organisation for whom Estella is a sought-after prize.

Here an intrepid hero is called for; Wilson introduces him in the person of Geoffrey Shawcross, a quiet local farmer who is also an ex-Vietnam veteran of the Special Air Service Regiment. He protects and falls in love with Estella.

With the main plot the author meshes two sub-plots: One, the attempt by some of her fellow students to seduce Estella and, two, Fr van Engelen's conflict with those who take a more extreme view of renewal processes initiated by Vatican II than he does.

As the narrative moves to its climax in The Castle of Heavenly Bliss, Shawcross deploys his SAS skills to rescue Estella and the author reveals the nature of the secret organisation - one readers may find reminiscent of Dan Brown's Priory of Sion in The Da Vinci Code.

Unlike the latter, this is a thriller of reverence for the Catholic faith as well as a scholarly novel of ideas and theology. It runs to 752 pages and is the first in what is scheduled to be a trilogy.

Like Walter Scott and Charles Dickens and any number of more recent authors, Wilson is his own publisher. At not a few points, there are signs he has essayed the more difficult challenge of being his own editor. Paradoxically the ease of computer editing makes this process more difficult. Too often Wilson, the author-editor, slows the drive of his undoubtedly imaginative plot lines with redundant material and above all by blurring and fudging his chapter breaks.

The exemplary work here is Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Waugh was a film buff and wrote his chapters as cinematic cuts. Result: despite an expensive script by John Mortimer, the classic television version of Brideshead Revisited was shot from the book not the script.

NB The few criticisms in this otherwise good review were taken into account in the revision.

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