In 1474, in a fictional location in southern Europe, Father Alberto arrives from Jormel Abbey, where he has failed in his ambition to become a manuscript illuminator at their renowned scriptorium. He is the new parish priest of the villages of Hem and Long, whose congregants are generally “piebald and errant”, but not the most peculiar or refractory of his flock. Among his duties is to tend to the mentally afflicted of the convent of Saint Particular, patron saint of the unloved, who are confined in cells for the greater part of the year.
The Inmates of Saint Particular
The fearsome Abbess and the silent Sister Lorenza introduce Alberto to his charges using the Index, an annotated manuscript of the inmates whose strange minds are “filled o’er the brim”. They include Pieter Mastiff, a raging, blaspheming carpenter; Selina, compulsively naked and unhappily sexual; Carin Marina, a former princess with a secret; Malike Dene, who has scarred his body with a map of the “topography of the universe known”; Zanzibar, a homicidal horse; and a mute girl in rags who “remorselessly attempts to fly”. These are only a few of a wide cast of characters in a fable-like novel that skilfully combines antic comedy with serious moral themes.
The Feast of the Holy Fool
At the end of each summer comes the Feast of the Holy Fool, a festival of misrule with intensely described acts of cursing, drunkenness, violence and sexual vagrancy. The mad are released to wander free but must be returned to their cells by the priest with the aid of his eccentric and resourceful sexton, Oblong. The most challenging to retrieve is the Flying Girl, who is fleet of foot on the ground and through the treetops. She speaks in “a cavalcade of light and tuneful gibberish” that might be birdsong.
Alberto's Sympathy and Innovations
Alberto exhibits immediate sympathy for the mad, saying to Sister Lorenza: “I do lament that all those poor souls are imprisoned largely at Saint Particular because there are no good names for what they are. What if here … we began a Christian study of madness?” He devises innovations to help them recover the inmates more humanely after the feast days: singing to the horse, which allows it to be haltered; calming Pieter by letting him exercise his skills in repairing the church; dressing, with Oblong, in wimples and veils to capture Selina, who finds comfort in the presence of nuns. The Abbess is enraged: “You imagine crude salvations for the enfeebled out of some vainglorious pride … God made us whole! … immutable! He made none of us riddles!”
A Novel of Moral Fable
The novel is organised around a progressing set of “instructions for a book as yet unbound”: an illustrated book of Angelo’s life told in retrospect from 10 years ahead of the main narrative. This is a consistently successful and engaging device, which vividly and often wittily illuminates the story and its themes. “Recto. The wooden church. With elevated heart I beheld the simple and lightly bent spire, nestled in a gloomy dell. It was not unimaginable that I might do good works here.”
Father Alberto is a moral fable in which madness is revealed, in Alberto’s words, as “a pinion of uncertainty around which a form of normality lies spun”, one that diverts the sane from uncomfortable questions about the nature of reality. Atack sets kindness and grace in clear opposition to the abuse of power and the failure of human sympathy. This novel is gratifyingly absorbing, with well-paced, occasionally violent, action and carefully revealed plot, while gesturing towards larger mysteries outside the margins of the tale. As Alberto concludes: “The truth is too large, and comes too slow, for our fast little lives … that this is also glorious and various, and manifold, that all we can ever be is some small part of the entirety.”
