Richard Power’s portrait is of a good man blocked by the very culture that makes him possible, and disabled by that very sensitivity which makes him such an honest minister. James Joyce had once written of the priesthood, whose vague acts pleased his protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, by reason of their semblance of reality and, at the same time, their distance from it. If Joyce anticipated John McGahern in offering compelling portraits of the artist as frustrated priest, Power has offered something that is even more unusual – a depiction of the priest as the ‘removed’ artist.

The money saved and never used becomes a symbol of a life lived at a remove from the well-springs of emotion, a life often fearful of committing itself to the here and now. For the Famine had not only destroyed people’s trust in nature, but it had also left them fearful of living with full relish in the present moment. Such an incapacity for primary experience was frequently notable in people of high intelligence, who might have what Flann O’Brien once mordantly called ‘a memory and no experience to account for it’. The fear of submitting to the sacrament of the present moment became also a fear of the future, causing terrible, shoddy compromises (such as panicky marriages based on convenience rather than on true feeling). To people of Power’s generation, the whole of life could seem like a preparation for something that never finally happened. For stay-at-home peasants, the saving of money in a stocking was one way of evading experience in the here-and-now; for richer people, that might involve the adoption of a profession which proofed them against real adventure. And the priesthood, as George Bernard Shaw said more than once, was like all professions: ‘a conspiracy against the laity’.

It took its harshest toll not on that laity but, as Power shows, upon the priests themselves. Tom Conroy remains at all times stoic and unsentimental: unlike the sugary padres of preceding popular novels, he knows it would be sentimental to invest his own life or world with more significance than God would give them. Some readers have found the novel’s diminuendo a little less compelling than the passages at its centre, but that, surely, is exactly as it should be: the kind of denouement in which people are dismayed not only by fate, but saddened by the fact that they are saddened so little. For this really is a story of emotional underdevelopment, in which the worst must ultimately return to laughter. There is no other position possible for those who believe in God than to find the antics of mankind hilariously funny and touching, ‘as if bubbles of pure laughter were trying to break through’.