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Recently, Jake Taylor met the Devil, and he's still shaken. He is not sure whether this was a genuine manifestation of transcendental evil or the horrible consequences of too much booze and too many pills, but the fact remains that he still is sleeping with the lights on. Nevertheless, Jack is as happy as he's ever been - he's met a woman, one he loves and who, astoundingly, seems to love him back. It's enough to get him off the sauce, or almost. Surely it can't matter that, on holiday in Paris, at the peak of his new-found joy, he forgot to touch wood. Back in Galway, the recession is in full swing and worse, the country is appalled and furious at the revelations of priestly child abuse, long tacitly known but now only grudgingly acknowledged by a church that was complicit in maintaining a united front against scandal. When a priest is mugged and left for dead, Jack's initial reaction is surprise, but then remarks, "The awful fact wasn't that priests were mugged in our shiny new country, but that more weren't." Ever the contrarian, the more his compatriots turn in disgust from the Church and its ways, the more Jack seems to embrace the superstitious reflexes of the past. As he remarks, he may be the last man in Ireland still praying the Angelus. But no amount of pious ejaculation (in both English and Irish), candle-lighting, or appeals to the Virgin can keep evil at bay. A small but dedicated group of social Darwinians, headed by a psychopath, is bent on punishing priests, savaging gays, killing special needs children, and destroying Jack's life, or what's left of it. By the time it is all over, Jack has travelled down a path to perdition further than he has ever gone before. THE DEVIL, the novel that precedes this in the series, was one the most frightening books I have ever read, despite, or really because, it wholly avoids any recourse to emotive language. HEADSTONE speaks in the same spare, cracked voice, but the evil Jack confronts is human and thus marginally explicable and so it lacks the motiveless malignity in THE DEVIL that kept me rivetted until I could finish the book. Nevertheless, HEADSTONE is required reading for anyone who's been following Jack Taylor's downward trajectory over the course of the series. Each book has left him just a little more damaged, a little more diminished. As we did at the end of THE DEVIL, we are left to ask, is there any place left to go? The final pages of HEADSTONE suggest that there is, and I'll take a deep breath, brace myself, and follow Jack when we find out where it is. § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, January 2012
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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