Author: Tom McCarthy and Bill Dohar
Publisher: De Profundis Books
Published: 2022-06-24
Total Pages: 371
ISBN-13:
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Myles Donne is certain of nothing except that he can never return to Oxford. Two years ago, as a much-admired Jesuit at the threshold of prestige and possibility, he made two irredeemable mistakes: he fell in love with the perfect woman and then killed her in a motorcycle accident. Shattered, he lost his faith, left the priesthood, abandoned his career and decamped to his birthplace in Colorado, where he’s been working in a hardware store, languishing in ignominious limbo. When he receives a dire and dubious plea from his late beloved’s brother Jeremy—a Jesuit and Myles’ estranged friend—against nearly every impulse within him he reluctantly agrees to return to the place of his greatest joy and hardest fall. Jeremy, a genial but lackluster Oxford don, has stumbled upon a tattered and unpublished manuscript by Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Though the unfinished poem has been ignored for well over a century, Jeremy believes it contains a series of word puzzles indicating the location of the Cuxham Chalice, a legendary treasure dating to England’s medieval past. Jeremy wants Myles’ help to decode the enigmatic sonnet, locate the chalice and, above all, to keep Jeremy safe from an unknown and dangerous adversary. Upon Myles’ arrival, Oxford is convulsing from the beheading of an innocent boy in an apparent act of Islamist terror and besieged by riots and violent reprisals. Two days into his visit, as Myles faces the discomfiting realization that his friend has exaggerated the sonnet's importance and his personal peril, Jeremy disappears. Myles soon realizes that persons other than Jeremy and his good friend Eva Bashir, college librarian and a secularized Muslim, are interested in the sonnet and its riddles. Myles and Eva appeal to police investigators who are now consumed with another wave of religious violence after a second beheading and cannot be bothered with a missing Jesuit. Determined that Jeremy’s whereabouts must hinge on something in the vexing manuscript, they strive to decipher its layered and intricate adumbrations. Nimble and unyielding interrogation of the sonnet eventually convinces Myles and Eva that Jeremy has been abducted and will be ritually murdered within a matter of hours. They’re equally stunned to discover a seminal connection between the murderer terrorizing Oxford and the cryptic Hopkins sonnet—why he wrote it on his deathbed and the chilling parallels that it draws to the present-day slayings. Interspersed throughout the twenty-first century narrative, a handful of chapters set in the nineteenth century unfold Hopkins’ story in the present tense. In revealing the origins of the poem, this parallel narrative also unveils the unlikely genesis of the serial murders tormenting Oxford. Myles and Eva decode the poem, and in finding where Hopkins hid the chalice they find Jeremy barely alive in a long-abandoned crypt. The discovery that a factotum from Jeremy’s own college is the villain comes as a shock: no one suspected the bland John Brooke of murder, racism and xenophobia, let alone a monomaniacal plot to scapegoat Muslims. Outwardly a treasure hunt, Dark Sonnet’s underlying trajectory is toward redemption: Hopkins’ painful and long-buried secret is told; Jeremy has revived his career and redeemed himself to all doubters; Eva comes to peace with her Muslim roots and agrees to support her daughter’s exploration of Islam; widespread efforts are under way in Oxford to address systemic prejudice and heal wounds through inter-religious dialogue on a grass-roots level; Myles saves Jeremy and heals the wounds from his sister’s untimely death by invoking the kinship and hope he had forsaken upon leaving Oxford. Before the novel’s end, Myles and Eva develop a gradually deepening connection and intensifying physical frisson. For Myles, their painful parting in the penultimate scene is mitigated by his receiving an astonishing and life-changing job offer, a position that would exploit his unusual skill set to investigate and recover historically significant artifacts around the globe.
