Review of “The Priest”

“While developing a strong sense of place and time with detail and description reminiscent of Steven Lawhead novels, and while the characters are engaging enough for this to be a novel, this story yanks you around. It requires intuitive thought….

“[It] takes on universal problems. It attempts to say what is unsayable, convey unwritable things. What thoughts can a deaf person have? He has no words. Images? Are deaf thoughts mere fragments, a collage of soundless pictorals that somehow a deaf person can use to apprehend meaning? Fearnside plays with this. A language crisis deconstructs the usual forms in interesting and useful ways. Classic postmodernism.

“In a larger sense this story takes on the problem of how we make sense of things. While the postmodern mind doesn’t depend on myths and grand narratives, it is not opposed to taking pieces of those and slapping them together to come up with something different. Hence, Fearnside takes the Church and Druids and forces them up against each other. The brothers in the story could patch together to represent a human soul with strong, but questioning, ties to the traditional church. The author could be using the first section to infuse the character of the boy with history and spiritual magic so that the soul represented by his character is large enough to challenge the other characters. Truth and meaning is created by the historical context. The author forces the reader to question the power of the Church as opposed to the power of the Druids. They rub together….”

—Susan Cowger, editor of Rock and Sling: A Journal of Literature, Art, and Faith, writing about this story as an Editor’s Choice in the Fall 2004 issue (p. 85)