At the start of Panos Karnezis's impressive third novel, a baby is found in a suitcase outside an isolated Spanish convent. At the end, the baby has been claimed by his mother and is travelling with her on a bus to the city. The story in between is a spiritual whodunnit ("it" being sexual intercourse unsanctioned by religious teaching) that raises many questions before gradually and satisfactorily answering them. We witness justice and injustice, theological controversy, the politics of a tiny enclosed society, despair, cruelty, generosity, scandal, suspicion and suicide, all told with immense verve and skill.
Karnezis makes his people credibly varied. Sister Mara Ines, the resourceful and confident mother superior, still commemorates a long-dead lover with ritual observances, her deep faith matched by her monstrous solipsism. Her rival, Sister Ana, harbours a fierce creed that sees diabolism and the need for exorcism everywhere. The other nuns have their preoccupations - stray dogs or secular songs - that fill the long days. Their visiting bishop is a diplomat with sleek hair and a tendency to insomnia. After his pastoral calls cease, he sends a newly ordained priest who combines gaucheness with a tender heart.
As the characters' biographies are outlined, we sense the history that formed them. There are distant echoes of the first world war, but the convent itself is stuck in an older era, with progress represented by the bishop's hazy liberalism, a wind-up gramophone and an unreliable Model T Ford. The city's minarets, courtyards of orange trees and scented steam baths recall the vanished Moorish empire, but time here is boundless. To Mara Ines, the damaged statues and peeling paint surrounding her are "the telltale signs of an undying remorse that trailed back to the Fall of Man".
Karnezis grew up speaking Greek, but his English is superbly apt and evocative, with only rare lapses into modern mid-Atlantic idiom, as when the priest says that goodness "comes with the territory". He isn't a writer with the verbal flamboyance of Conrad, Nabokov or Aleksandar Hemon, but he produces beautifully clear images: the distant sound of a baby crying during prayers, clouds of white stork feathers blowing in the convent windows, an oak confessional that smells like a coffin, a priestly garment catching on rose bushes and leaving "a trail of perfumed red petals". His symbols are powerfully effective because he makes us see what he describes.
A novel about sex and religion can easily become lurid or sentimental, but Karnezis avoids both temptations. Mara Ines recalls a long-gone romance, and the guilt of a secret abortion feeds her conviction that the new baby has been sent as a miraculous atonement. Her spirituality may conceal from her that it's easier "to love the whole world than a single human being". The book's other carnal moment is chastely described but full of sensual force. Flickering candles, the removal of a pectoral cross, the undoing of 33 buttons on a cassock - these carry a sense of authoritative emotional conviction.
Advertisement
Karnezis treats the nuns' narrow piety without mockery but with tacit irony. Mara Ines poisons the dogs so that they are left "slowly dying in the creamy pools of their own vomit"; she also carries the baby ecstatically through a pine wood with dew underfoot. She is led to realise "that there is a multitude of worlds one is not aware of ". The shifts in mood occur without strain. When in the last pages the priest sanctions the sin that has led to the innocence of a baby, the appropriateness of his simple act is underwritten by the subtlety of what has gone before.
The Convent by Panos Karnezis
Cape £12.99 pp224