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Costello is not a mean man by his own fixed lights. Even when presiding over an ecclesiastical kangaroo court that is investigating a nun suspected of heresy, he is not lacking in charity but in imagination. It can be seen that the nun on trial has grace; Maitland seeks it and Dr. Costello believes that he is already blessed with it.
Father Maitland's dilemma is intricately worked out like a fine, stout piece of convent lace. In the process, the author shows himself as a dealer in the comedy of the spirit far different from Graham Greene's celebrated psychodramas of doubt, doom and—damnation. His scenes are as funny as J. F. Powers', but without their cozy in-joke comicality. Keneally's humor is white, not black—a blessed relief. His book is infused with a pawky clerical awareness that human life, though sometimes capable of holiness, is more often merely funny. Thus perceptively armed, he has succeeded in translating the historic fissure in the present church into human terms. Whatever may be said of Thomas Keneally's vocation for the priesthood, he has a true vocation for fiction.