Review: Priest

Priest by Ken Bruen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In some ways you can get a sense of what to expect from a Jack Taylor novel from our protagonist’s drug of choice. In The Guards it was alcohol. In The Killing of the Tinkers it was cocaine. In the Magdalene Martyrs it was various synthetic opioids. And in The Dramatist it was, for a time, the Catholic Mass.

In this one, then, with the series seeming to reinvent itself in the wake of the devastating death of Jeff and Cathy’s baby at the end of The Dramatist, it’s suddenly less clear what Jack is “on.” He makes it a practice of ordering booze of one sort or another and then just letting it sit on the bar. That suggests he’s into self-denial. He’s also understandably overwrought by guilt over losing sight of little Serena May allowing her to tumble out the window. So there’s self-flagellation.

In any case, much of this novel feels like a comeback in terms of quality from the more by-the-numbers work of The Dramatist. Bruen can still write – I can’t imagine he’d ever forget how to do that – but once he’d defined his character as fully as he did, it left room only for fresh plot twists. In most of Priest, he’s pulled into cases connected to old acquaintances – to Fr. Malachy who’s always hated him and to Ridge who’s usually hated him – and they make sense. It all feels of its moment, with the Irish economy of the early 2000s humming along and with the sudden visibility of priest sexual abuse cases.

I admire the overall atmosphere of most of this. Jack loathes himself but keeps on going, out of habit as much as anything. Bruen, as I imagine it, has taken his character and his series much farther than he imagined at its start, and he too seems to be pushing on into dark and uncertain territory. In the best of ways, he’s exploring the dregs of what he began almost a decade before, and we see his character getting more and more spent. He’s running out of places to hide – his old landlady has died as well – and once he’s released from the sanitarium where he’s been near catatonic for months, he has to make a new life for himself or die.

And the strongest part of this is that the preferable choice isn’t obvious. Jack lives on the brink of pure despair, and there’s power in seeing Bruen explore how that looks to him.

For the most part, the Jack Taylor novels deliver on their endings. Certainly The Killing of the Tinkers goes from very good to really memorable in its final scene, and the others have generally ended on a resounding emotional note. The Dramatist could have gone either way – it certainly felt manipulative, but I was okay with it so long as it produced some of the self-recrimination and reinvention of this one – but this one ends in a way that I think of as beneath the very talented Bruen.

[SPOILER] For the first time, I saw where Bruen was heading long before he got there. The relationship with his surrogate son “Cody” felt forced, but his murder (presumably by Cathy) in the final paragraphs is downright contrived. It hits a false emotional note, it too neatly echoes the end of The Dramatist, and it suggests a too-great consciousness that one novel in the series is supposed to lead to the next. I’m disappointed because, that ending aside, I found a lot to be impressed with here, and I was decidedly curious to see if Bruen could sustain it.

So, after all this, I may be on board for one more, but I find myself for the first time in a while more interested in Bruen’s other work than in spending time seeing how he paints himself out of the ever-shrinking corner that remains of this generally very impressive series.


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