The Seville Communion by
Arturo Perez-Reverte
hbk out April 98
Published by Harvill
at £15.99
Is nothing sacred? A hacker codenamed Vespers has penetrated the
sophisticated security system of the Vatican and left a message on the
Pope's personal computer. The message begs the world's most powerful
monarch to intervene to prevent the threatened demolition of Our Lady of
Tears, a dilapidated Baroque church in Seville. Vespers claims the
church has started to protect itself by killing those that threaten its
existence. Orders filter through the hierarchy to Father Lorenzo Quart,
the elegant trouble-shooter of the Vatican Information Service, who is
despatched to Seville to report.
The church, Quart discovers, is already doomed. An unholy alliance
between the local archbishop and a land-hungry bank has long since
settled its fate. The vice chairman of the bank, a dashing, designer-
suited piranha, has delegated the resolution of minor problems to
Seville's criminal fraternity. All that stands in the way of the
church's destruction are an uncouth little parish priest and his curate,
a widowed duchess and her beautiful daughter, an American nun, a
dwindling congregation and - well, maybe - the church itself.
But who is Vespers? Were the two deaths in the church as accidental as
the police believe? This is Seville, and even the questions are less
straightforward than they seem. Hot, old and beautiful, the city is full
of ghosts. Quart is haunted by his predecessors as Papal hard men, the
crusading Knights Templar who died for their faith in Palestine, and by
unfinished business in his own past. There's also the problem of
duchess's long-dead aunt, a woman whom love drove mad and whose
correspondence finds its way, a century after it was written, to Quart's
hotel bedroom.
Nor are Quart's flesh-and-blood problems any easier to handle. The
archbishop dislikes him. The old priest is obdurate, and the curate is
violent. Quart needs all his self-discipline to cope with the disturbing
allure of the duchess's daughter, who is also, as it happens, the
estranged wife of the predatory banker. Everywhere he goes, Quart is
followed by a bogus lawyer, a retired bullfighter and an alcoholic
flamenco singer. As the plot twists and turns though the labyrinthine
streets of Seville, Quart becomes increasingly uncertain which mystery
he is attempting to solve. The real enigmas lie within: the dark secrets
of his own heart and the nature of faith in the modern world.
Classy and brimming with panache, The Seville Communion is much more
than a witty, well-constructed entertainment, just as Quart is no
ordinary detective but a sexy soldier of Christ armed with a gold credit
card and a laptop computer. As The Flanders Panel and The Dumas Club
have already shown, Perez-Reverte has a refreshing ability to escape
from the formulaic confines of crime fiction without sacrificing the
genre's reader-friendly virtues. He uses this crime novel as the launch
pad for an ambitious investigation which is as much metaphysical and
theological as forensic. Yet he always plays by rules: only in the very
last sentence do we learn the identity of the murderer.
This review first appeared in The Independent on 13 April 1998
(
Andrew Taylor
- author of the highly acclaimed Roth & Lydmouth Series)
