The Devil's Advocate
By Morris West

448 Pages • $12.95

The Devil's Advocate
By Morris West

About the Author

Morris West was a Rome-based journalist and a Vatican insider who is remembered for his four “Vatican” novels about conflict and turmoil at the highest levels of the church. The best known of these is The Shoes of the Fisherman, featuring a pope from Eastern Europe (written long before John Paul II’s election).

But The Devil’s Advocate is Morris West’s best novel, and it has little to do with Vatican politics. The book is about an investigation into the life of a man popularly believed to be a saint. West uses the plot to explore profound spiritual themes, such as the close connection between suffering and saintliness, and the mystery of redemption.

The Devil’s Advocate is set in two villages in Calabria, a miserably poor region of Italy south of Naples, in the years following World War II. The alleged saint is a young local man named Giacomo Nerone, who was killed by Communists toward the end of the war. Nerone was beloved by the local people while he was alive; after his death, they proclaimed him a saint. At the beginning of the novel, Rome opens an investigation into the matter.

The “devil’s advocate” of the novel’s title is Father Blaise Meredith, a British priest who is dispatched to the region with instructions to scrutinize with utmost skepticism the stories of the superstitious peasants. Just prior to receiving his assignment, Meredith learns that he has untreatable stomach cancer. With only months to live, he is heartsick and afraid. His boss, Cardinal Marotta, tells him candidly, “There is no passion in your life, my son. You have never loved a woman, nor hated a man, nor pitied a child. You have withdrawn yourself too long and you are a stranger in the human family.” Meredith’s last job for the church, then, becomes a journey that might also heal his sick soul.

Untangling Nerone’s story turns out to be very difficult. His secrets are kept by a group of local people who knew him well. There is Nina, the reputed saint’s lover, who is despised by the local people as the “saint’s whore.” There is the local parish priest, Father Anselmo, poor and ignorant and living openly with a woman. There is Nerone’s illegitimate child, Paolo, a confused adolescent who is being pursued by Nicholas Black, a gay British painter. There is the cunning and manipulative local contessa, and a scornful yet idealistic local doctor named Aldo Meyer, who is Jewish and an atheist.

Meredith takes on the challenge of understanding these difficult people in the hope of understanding the holiness of the mysterious Giacomo Nerone. He does so in the end. And, before his own end, Meredith makes himself useful to Nerone’s people. In so doing, he finds redemption for himself.

The Devil’s Advocate contains echoes of The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene’s 1940 novel about a deeply troubled priest who finds redemption in service to the poor in revolutionary Mexico. Both West’s Meredith and Greene’s “whiskey” priest are redeemed through facing what they most fear. They live in a world where faith involves suffering, and where sin and salvation are urgent realities.

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About the Author

The eldest of six children, Morris Langlo West was born in 1916 in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, where he later attended a school run by the Christian Brothers. His parents separated when Morris was still a youth. At thirteen he entered the Christian Brothers, but he left the order at twenty-three, after earning a degree from the University of Melbourne and before taking final vows. As he later wrote in his autobiography, A View from the Ridge, West felt at this point like a man with no past and no clear direction for his future.

West joined the army and married for the first time. In 1945, two years after his military career ended, he published a pseudonymous first novel, Moon in My Pocket, about a young man who becomes disillusioned with the religious life. For the next nine years he worked in radio, mainly writing scripts. His marriage failed, and his effort to gain a church annulment clearly colored his later jaded attitude toward ecclesiastical processes. Married again in 1953, West left Australia with his wife and young son and did not return for a quarter century. At different times, he lived in Italy, England, and the United States. At his death in 1999 at the age of eighty-three, West was living comfortably in the Northern Beaches district of Sydney and working on a novel based on the life of Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century Dominican priest who was burned at the stake for heresy by the Roman Inquisition.

In addition to numerous radio dramas, screenplays, and stage plays, Morris West wrote thirty books of fiction and nonfiction. Altogether, they sold more than sixty million copies in twenty-seven languages, making him Australia’s top-selling author to date. Of the four awards he received for his novels, The Devil’s Advocate garnered three: the Royal Society’s William Heinemann Award, the National Brotherhood Award from the National Council of Christians and Jews, and the James Tait Black Memorial Award. In 1961, a theatrical adaptation of The Devil’s Advocate was produced in New York City by Dore Shary.

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