The Seville Communion | Arturo Perez-Reverte

The Seville Communion | Arturo Perez-Reverte | Eucharistic Detective Story with a Keystone Cops Flair

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The Seville Communion

	The Seville Communion Arturo Perez-Reverte Harvest Books, 2004 - 375 pages average customer review:based on 107 reviews view larger image
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A?diabolically good? hacker puts a message on the pope?s computer, pleading for him to save a seventeenth-century Spanish church?a church that is killing to defend itself.Although Our Lady of the Tears is but a crumbling baroque building in the heart of Seville, it is also the center of a multilayered mystery?one that will force ecclesiastical sleuth Father Lorenzo Quart to question his loyalty, his vow of chastity, and his faith itself.

My Only Disappointment...

...with The Seville Communion is that there has been no follow-up novel with Fr. Lorenzo Quart.

By any standards, this is a fine novel. Fr. Quart struggles to make sense of the world in which he finds himself. He did not join the priesthood out of a calling to serve God, but as a means of escape from the poverty-stricken life of a fisherman, a life that killed his father. He struggles with issues of faith, which he lacks. Yet with all that, he tries to live honestly the life he chose, by following the rules. He is, as his superior says, "the good soldier."

The character's honesty and his struggle to remain the good soldier lift this book out of its genre into the realm of literature. The translator no doubt deserves some credit for this as well. Like one of the other reviewers, I have read others of Perez-Reverte's books, but this is his best, although the others did not waste my time.

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Eucharistic Detective Story with a Keystone Cops Flair

Ten years after its initial English Language publication, I've finally read "The Seville Communion," and I apologize to Arturo Perez-Reverte for having ignored it all these years! It's one of his best and best-written stories. Kudos to Sonia Soto, translator, as her work is nearly perfect, much better than some later translated works of this author.

Arturo Perez-Reverte is a master at setting the pace for a reader. At least in this tale, that is his great gift to us. Whether it is Father Quart's painfully measured reactions, whether it is the slow pace of faded aristocratic life in Seville, or whether it is the heartbreaking buildup of sexual tension between Macarena and Lorenzo Quart, the author lures you into the pace and timing of the moment, the scene or the emotion. You are with the characters at all times and with the pace Perez-Reverte sets for you.

True to Perez-Reverte's long-standing theme, this book doesn't disappoint in its knock out body slam against the Catholic Church, especially his piercing (and decidedly correct) condemnation of its greedy, devious, self-centered and despicable hierarchy. This venerable religion, according to the author, finds its own salvation only in higher-minded smaller figures, who are the main characters in the book: one, Father Lorenzo Quart, who is a sort of CIA agent for the Vatican and is the story's central character, and the other, who is an aging, kind of beat-up cynical and grumpy former rural priest, Father Priamo Ferro, now the pastor of the broken-down, decaying Church of Our Lady of Tears in Seville.

It's a very good mystery/detective story (not really a "thriller"), set in slow-to-slower Seville in the mid-1990s, but with a current twist that involves a hacker who has broken into the Vatican private files, warning the Pope about the need to save the decaying church.

What I liked about this story were the 4 strong and very different women characters: one a down-and-out ex-cabaret singer, still mourning her long-lost love; the second, a 70-something doyenne, more-or-less the brains of the bunch and one of the few remaining "Spanish aristocrats;" third, Gris Marsala, an jeans-and-sweatshirt American ex-patriot nun overseeing the church renovation; and finally the ultimate love interest of Father Quart, Macarena, a 30-something dazzling beauty (and daughter of the old woman), who has an ulterior motive for almost everything. She is the story's second central character. As in "Queen of the South," whose most memorable characters are women, the women in "Seville" dwarf almost all other characters in the book, except for Father Quart, who is described as an almost unbelievably good-looking, sexy, smart 39 year-old stony-calm, ever-so-perfect-in-appearance-and-body-and-demeanor priest who does Rome's bidding perfectly - well almost. Quart is aptly characterized on Page 35, "...the Catholic Church from the start was to Quart what the army was to other young men: a place where rules provided most of the answers as long as one didn't question the basic concept."

Many pages of the story are hilarious, especially in relating the antics, mistakes and incompetencies of the trio of "Banana Republic" idiot-bad-guys. These 3 people, and their handler, are cast right out of a Keystone Cops movie, but with a Panama hat and bulging white suit re-characterization. In fact, some of the characters are so enamored with old American film noir and "B" movies that they quote lines from the movies to each other. They appear to be right off a boat from Havana, say in 1925!

As usual, there are many memorable lines. About Seville, page 228, "....the city retained, as no other city, the gentle hum of time slowly extinguishing itself..." Page 266, describing those from the lost aristocracy, "...the awareness of the dying world, the temptation to side with the parvenus in order to survive. The desperation of intelligence." Page 280, in a nostalgic look at a disappearing society, "Some worlds don't end with an earthquake or great crash....They expire quietly, with a discreet sigh."

In some of his more recent works, Perez-Reverte fails to provide a suitable ending for his stories, such as in his very disappointing "Painter of Battles." Here, however, earlier in his writing career, the book's ending is really quite good, and the last 75 pages read quickly and satisfyingly. At the beginning of Chapter XIV, Page 347, Perez-Reverte quotes Vladimir Nabokov, "There are people - among whom I would include myself - who detest happy endings." How true, how true, Arturo, we know you include yourself among them also, and like it or not, we follow along behind you.

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If you read one book this year, read this one

Great storylines, well-written prose, and vivid characters make this a must read. The storyline and the secondary storyline were well-thought and makes it a page-turner.

Odd Mystery with a Side of Computers

"The Seville Communion" by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, ©1995
translated from the Spanish by Sonia Soto

I started to read this story and was expecting something else. I thought it could be like "The DaVince Code" or some computer hacker type story. I kept waiting for all the action to happen. It did not happen. I kept waiting for some computer type probing or wandering around in cyberspace. That did not happen either.
The book starts with some hacker going into the Papal computer system and leaving a message for the Pope. The surprise is in who that person is. That is revealed in the end, but before that there is a lot of consternation about an old church in the middle of Seville. The property is valuable developed and the church is in the middle of what would be the development. This throws a wrench into the development plans or means the destruction of the church. Apparently there is no middle ground.
I did not understand all the intricacies, but a fact finder priest is sent to sort out what is going on. He finds he is told nothing important, if anything at all. The uproar is over the value of the institution as a neighborhood church or money in the pocket of the developers. The Bishop would like to remove the church, the parish priest is dead set against it. The author intimates that a happy ending is not something he is going to bother doing if it is not believable, as he should not, and so it goes.

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