243. The Masterful Monk, by Owen Francis Dudley (read 8 Mar 1946) On March 6, 1946, I wrote: "Started tonight The Masterful Monk. By far the best of Father Dudley's books. It is the third of his series. It is sweeping in its intense excitement . Deals entirely, of course, with religion." On page 337 of The Guide to Catholic Literature 1888-1940 appears this note: "A dramatic story, having for its theme the modern attack on Man and his moral nature." ( )

The Masterful Monk is a period 1920s Catholic melodrama thriller. If you come to it expecting that, you'll enjoy it. If you don't, you probably won't. But where else can you read about a mad atheist intent on wiping out religion while seducing the heroine? The answer: only here.

Beauty (that's what everyone calls her) is a lovely lapsed Catholic, who has decided that excitement and not missing out are more important than her faith. She hangs out with artsy, intellectual types and is embarrassed by her Catholic scruples. So when she reads about a speech by a radical secularist named Julian Verrers, she gets one of her society friends to invite him to dinner so she can meet him. Suffice to say, they hit it off.

However, when he pushes things to far and asks Beauty to sleep with him, she resists and asks for more time. She spends the weekend at the estate of the friend of a friend, who knew Verrers while they were serving in Belgium during the Great War. There she meets Basil, a nice, eligible young man, who is (unbeknownst to himself at that point) on his way to Rome following in the path of his elder brother. He and Beauty fall for each other immediately, but he won't budge on the issue of faith, and she doesn't want to miss out on any excitement by being told what to do by the Church.

Also at Basil's family estate that weekend is Brother Anselm, the "masterful monk" of the title, who took care of Basil's brother Eric after he was severely injured in a climbing accident in the Alps. He and Eric have also had run-ins with our friend Verrers, and the monk is back in England to give a reply to his recent speeches. Basil invites Beauty to hear this lecture, and she is turned away from Verrers forever, but she still refuses to return to the Faith. And Verrrers does not like to take "no" for an answer. Will Beauty ever truly escape from his clutches and rejoin the Church? Will she and Basil ever be able to be together? Is there anything the masterful monk cannot accomplish? Read on and find out.

It's very, very period. The swear word of the day is "blast!", which is spelled "bl--t!" throughout. Content-wise there's a lot of stuff that is still applicable to modern life: faith vs. science, religion vs. modernism, church vs. state, etc. However, it's dressed up in some rather vintage duds. And you probably shouldn't attempt many of the methods of conversion used in the book, unless you have access to a priest as masterful as Brother Anselm (or Father Brown). Still, I enjoyed it, until the last couple of chapters, when the melodrama veered off into the truly ridiculous. But for a book written in 1929, I'm willing to make allowances for taste. Highly recommended, with reservations, to those looking for vintage Catholic fiction with a bit of suspense tossed in. ( )

OK, not a proper review, but I really liked this book, and so did my husband and my 22yo daughter. It's an exciting, fast-paced story, with romance, tragedy, and danger and a religious angle which I enjoyed: not preachy, thankfully (or I would not have like it at all). The era seems to be the 1930s...but maybe it's the 1950s? A little hard to tell...a war recently ended - is it WWI, or WWII? Oh, I know, there are servants, and mansions...that's why I think it's after WWI. And there is the monk himself...a bit of a Brother Cadfael (although he predates him, in that Dudley created him a decade before Ellis Peters created Brother Cadfael). ( )