Enforcing Terrible Secrets

A transition from journalism to literature is not always easy or successful, but The Bishop’s Man by Linden MacIntyre proves definitely that it can be done. MacIntyre, for decades the CBC’s voice and face of fresh disasters on the fifth estate and other programs, has written one previous novel (The Long Stretch) anda memoir (Causeway: A Passage from Innocence) before creating this fictional work centred on the grim topic of priestly pedophilia and set in the author’s native Cape Breton. So the book is no barrel of monkeys.

However, the author gives us strong characters set on a sturdy stage and a novel with a sound structure of many twisted strands of plot brought together at last in a satisfactory way. The novel’s winning of the Giller Prize this past fall indicates definitively that hacks can indeed turn into artists.

Father Duncan MacAskill is called back to a small parish near his birthplace and hellish childhood in...