Review: Worthy of a literary award
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 29, 2013
Reading ‘Fallen Men’, I can’t help comparing author Brian O’Hare to another great author Ian McEwan (‘Atonement’, ‘The Cement Garden’). There is something about the way O’Hare could get under your skin and into your heart—the sheer emotional gravitas of his writing could enthral you for hours.Desperately bleak with sudden flashes of redemption and hope at turns, ‘Fallen Men’ is about three priests caught in the vortex of a scandal. When one of them—part out of kindness and part out of his own desperation to find solace from his painful past—makes the mistake of befriending a pretty choir girl—a friendship that blossoms into an actual love affair—a cascade of regrettable events ensues. It didn’t help that the girl’s still a minor, and in a town where private and public moralities bleed into each other, this scandal embroils everyone in the clergy and inevitably puts a spotlight on people’s sense of right and wrong.The choices made by the three priests—either out of personal motivations or what they perceive as part of their duty—inevitably unravels the social and religious mores that are relevant regardless of what culture or country you are in. The multiple layers of meaning—the way, for instance, one of the priests stumbles upon the truth about his own motives and his apparent shock at discovering how he’d been living a phony life—hits the reader in successive waves of poignant realizations.Author O’Hare can stun you with his plot twists, and he can stun you with the way he builds up the mounting climax. Yet, this is a thinking man’s novel—it will force upon you very personal, even uncomfortable questions, about your own value system—and even so it never fails to entertain.Overall, I highly recommend ‘Fallen Men’ to anyone who loves a compelling story that will deeply haunt you for days. O’Hare is a top-notch writer who always delivers—this is the second book by this author that I’ve read, and he never fails to hit the spot. ‘Fallen Men’ deserves all the five-star ratings it gets.