Newsnight Review discussed Thomas Keneally's latest novel.

"The Office of Innocence" draws on Keneally's former experiences as a trainee priest in Australia.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 08 November 2002

TOM PAULIN:
I thought the first 60 pages were interesting, Graeme Greene in Australia, if you are interested in religious faith, and Catholicism, then it falls apart.

He studied for the priesthood and he gets a phrase in the Latin mass wrong. When I saw that, I thought this isn't going to work ....

KIRSTY WARK:
You picked up on that immediately ....

TOM PAULIN:
Absolutely, it's on the first page of Ulysses. You would think he would know that. Boosting about studying for the priesthood.

And then you can spot the murderer a mile-off. And it's written in a plain dogged prose and it gets worse and worse.

KIRSTY WARK:
It's divided into two books. It starts in the examination of the impossibly innocent priest and turns into a cops and robberies, murder easily solved. The pace completely alters.

WILL SELF:
I suppose it does. It does kind of accelerate towards the end. I suspect people would like it. It's one of the novels I describe as workman like.

What puzzled me about the book the most, various things puzzled me, you get none of the character of Australia, it's an Anglican version of Australia and here you have an innocent young priest and has only had two erections in his life.

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
I can't comment on the erections. I didn't dislike it as much as you two. There are good sentences. Here's one "he could feel the warmth of doubt begin to rise from them, like condensed water from a scorched surface ."

There are pleasures like to be found in the book. Those are one of the things I concentrated on. I think he brings together the research to known fact and meld it properly with a fictional enterprising in the way the Project fails to do.

And he uses this to ask questions which are pertinent and potent now - how we make our morality and what is our moral sense.

WILL SELF:
We don't want pleasures with the book. We want to be taken into a crisis of faith here.