Vicar of Christ

What makes The Vicar of Christ extraordinary is that it proves itself by paradox--reconciling and weaving together strong, seemingly incompatible elements into a cohesive, memorable work quite unlike any other in recent fiction. Ambitious in length and scope, the stage is nothing less than the contemporary world, its recent history and prophecy; while the focus, from several points of view, is clearly upon a single man--an American--who rises to become Bishop of Rome. As a narrative, The Vicar of Christ both reclaims and extends a tradition as old as the novel itself. But it is not only its epic design, its profundity as a psychological study, and the riddle it poses of fame and fortune and their place in politics that distinguish this story. There is, too, the mosaic of shardlike details, each meticulously exact, that makes the whole the unique sum of its parts. The seep of the novel carries Declan Walsh out of two wars and thrusts him into the bright center of the civilized world: the Supreme Court of the United States and, later, the Curia of the Vatican--whose rival political factions, with their craft, false promises, and betrayals, are, in many ways, far more treacherous battlefields than the windswept hills of Korea.