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Manuel Borda: Free at Last! The Road to Reconciliation. Strategic Book Publishing and Rights, 2013. 305 pp.

Poet and critic Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in the US, says that “although Roman Catholicism constitutes the largest religious and cultural group in the US, Catholicism currently enjoys almost no positive presence in the American fine arts – not in literature, music, sculpture, or painting”.

He adds that this “marks a major historical change – an impoverishment, indeed even a disfigurement – for Catholicism, which has for two millennia played a hugely formative and inspirational role in the arts”. It is also, he says, a loss for the country, in which nearly a quarter is Catholic.

Manuel Borda takes up his religion with a vengeance. It is not that he writes preachy novels, but that he faces bravely the incidence of the Gospel on real lived life, and makes this impact the protagonist of his writing.

This is the third of three novels reviewed here. In all three books, a common principal character pervades the high and low ground. The Gospel gives good directives for his rise in business, fast living brings his downfall in the second, while a return to good sense in the third brings redemption.

In the first book, The Narrow Road to Success, Goodison discovers that the Gospel could help him achieve his aims if he correctly applied its principles in economic and business environments.

In the second book, The Wide Road to Destruction, Goodison loses all sense of family duty and shirks his responsibilities. Instead, he goes abroad for a prolonged period of rest. A number of distant countries and their economies are vividly described by the savant Borda, a former Speaker of Parliament and lecturer of economics at the University.

Free at Last! knocks real sense into Goodison. The book opens with a fast moving first chapter that functions more as a prologue. It provides a tonne of information. Goodison has survived a murder attempt... he is in a Botswana hospital; his wife has already been killed by mistake when a jealous ex-worker tried to murder him. His two sons die in an accident as they fly to visit him in hospital. He attempts to hang himself.

He turns against a God who can allow bad things to happen. Rebellion leads to denial of God’s existence, something resorted to by many who get more affliction than they judge fair for them. How does Goodison come back from the abyss of despair? That is the work of the novel. It is complicated, vivid, lively, exciting and involved – or there would be no novel, but a sermon.

First to hit him in the face – after what has been outlined above – is a suicide attempt by an 11-year-old. Then comes a friendly police inspector who is worried, and even a Capuchin friar from old times, whose proposition of a kind and loving God squares little with Goodison’s present experience.

The friar’s prayers beside the sick boy’s bed elicit a challenge by Goodison about the effectiveness or otherwise of prayer. If there is no God, prayer is a waste of time, and if there is, He has much to answer for. Goodison is a man trained to weigh facts, and only facts, carefully. There seems to be no evidence of the existence of God, and much less of a caring one.

He likes to wind a good tale, with lots of surprises, around the straight and narrow road as the Gospel tells it

Then, by chance, a tramp trudges into the picture trailing his homelessness, helplessness and vagrancy. It is he who helps him discover his inner peace. Pope Francis would have been enthralled to meet and sup with him. Realising that money is not everything, Goodison finds peace and dedicates his life to philanthropy.

Sounds melodramatic when recounted like that, but Borda is well-grounded in economics and in religion. In his long career he has travelled extensively to remote countries in Africa and the Far East and knows many of them at first hand. Above all, he likes to wind a good tale, with lots of surprises, around the straight and narrow road as the Gospel tells it.

The amazing thing about this latest novel is that even a reader who didn’t believe in himself, let alone God, would enjoy the telling, and learn a few basic things into the bargain, about life.

Ah, and there are those eternal problems of existence that bother all of us, faced squarely, weighed judiciously and brought to a head.