The Anglican Church in Tasmania                                                             Search
	a healthy church...transformingLIFE
	Home      About      Contact us      News      Issues      Parishes      Prayer      Calendar      Youth      Resources

	October 2003				The Sixth Lamentation by William Brodrick, Little, Brown 2003. RRP $30
		The Sixth Lamentation reviewed by Sheelagh Wegman
			In his Author's Note, William Brodrick says This novel weaves fact and fiction. The historical framework…and details of life in Paris during the Occupation are…accurate... The idea was prompted by an event in the life of my mother...who was imprisoned and eventually released. She died of motor neurone disease in 1989. The Prologue begins in London with Agnes Aubret, terminally ill and realising her past will be known to no-one in her family unless she tells the story. 'Loose ends are only tied up in books,' she says as she purchases two school notebooks. That night on TV she sees a face from sixty years ago and starts to write her story for her granddaughter, Lucy. Chapter One also begins in England, but a world away, at Larkwood Priory where Father Anselm has just finished afternoon confessions and is confronted in his church by an old man who asks, 'Father, what does a man do when the world has turned against him?' Fr Anselm replies, 'in the old days you'd claim sanctuary …if the accusation was unjust.' The old man is Edward Schwermann, a suspected Nazi war criminal. Dovetailing of two personal histories The narrative moves between past and present and the separate stories of Agnes and Edward are entangled in a remarkable and compelling story. The complexities of the plot could only be managed, I think, by an author with a 'double major' in law - that is, religious law and secular law! William Brodrick is just such an author: an Augustinian friar who left the order to become a practising barrister. This is a mirror image of the career of Fr Anselm, who was a barrister before taking Holy Orders. Much contemporary literature examines themes of grace and redemption and forgiveness, but in this novel these themes are not simply a vague sub-text: They are the nub of the story. The dovetailing of two personal histories is intriguing, but so too is Brodrick's treatment of this period of French history. Many Holocaust stories have emerged from other countries in Europe, but not much is told of the dark side of the Vichy and the Occupation of France. The author reveals a deep understanding of Vatican politics and the shadowy pragmatism of wartime survival for the church. Brodrick gives an extensive bibliography of historical sources. This book also confirms the far reach, to the present day, of the shadow of the Holocaust, exemplified in the mysterious character named Salomon Lachaise who introduces himself as 'the Son of the Sixth Lamentation'. The Five Lamentations of Jeremiah mourned the destruction of Jerusalem; here, the Sixth Lamentation refers to the Holocaust. Set aside a few hours and read it - you won't be disappointed.