Volume 31, Number 2 · February 16, 1984
The Deceiving Conscience
By Julian Moynahan
Cal
by Bernard Mac Laverty
Braziller, 170 pp., $12.95
The Summoning
by Robert Towers
Harper and Row, 336 pp., $15.95
Both these novels by established writers are about people undergoing crises of conscience in circumstances of modern political and social turmoil. Young Cal Mc Crystal, the unemployed Belfast laborer of Cal, has done driving jobs for IRA hit men and feels directly implicated in the murder of a Protestant farmer named Morton at his own house door and in the grievous wounding of Morton's elderly father. He wants to get free of the violent men and somehow make a proper acknowledgment and full expiation of his guilt, but his problem becomes much more perplexing when, through a fairly believable concatenation of events, he finds work at the Morton farm and falls painfully in love with the murdered man's widow, the Roman Catholic Marcella.
Review, 2264 words
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