The Unspeakable

By Charles L. Calia

Book Overview

The Unspeakable is a stirring novel about friendship, faith, and forgiveness, and the bond between two men, both priests, struggling to free themselves from the destructive past that haunts them both. Peter Whitmore, an administrator for the Archdiocese of St. Paul, is asked to investigate and ultimately discredit a priest who, it is rumored, possesses a remarkable power - the power to heal. Moreover, the priest in question, Jim Marbury, is not a stranger to Whitmore. He is an old friend from seminary and a spiritual mentor whom Whitmore hasn't seen in more than twenty years. But much has changed. Marbury is now mute, speaking only in sign language, his voice reportedly stolen by God on a trip through western Pennsylvania. On that same journey, in a supposed snowstorm that nobody could verify later, Marbury encountered a terrible car accident and a family that irrevocably changed his life. Drawn into a place he had never imagined, Marbury finds a world where the past repeats itself, only this time with different results. And now Whitmore, his old friend, must decide for himself which events are the manipulation of the hand of God and which are the delusions of a priest who has descended into madness.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0688167101
• ISBN13: 9780688167103
• Release Date: December 1998
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.7" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Donor fatigue

The book would make a good movie. It is the period of the Vietnam war and some of the resulting instabilities have affected the students at a Catholic seminary near Decorah, Iowa. An approximately eight year attempt by a priest, Marbury, to feed the hungry, house the homeless has left him on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Traveling in Pennsylvania he experiences a sort of epiphany, emerging without a voice, but with the power to heal. A church investigator, Peter Whitmore, a fellow seminarian twenty years earlier, undertakes an investigation for the Bishop. Marbury is about to be defrocked, it would seem. The story concerns moral obtuseness and spiritual blessedness in a mix of past and future events in the parallel routes of the investigator and the investigated. The condition of muteness underlies the theme of indeterminancy comprising the plot.

Intricate.....

Calia is a masterful wordsmith. Admittedly, however, this work is not meant for all (therefore may not become overly popular) Its profundity may not be picked up by readers who have not witnessed or experienced some of the internal conflicts and reconciliations presented through the characters of Marbury and Whitmore. Like Wagner's "Ring", I predict we'll find many subtle and interlacing themes, barely connectable by readers who look only for the obvious in writing, but there for those that don't, in future works by this writer.