Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 18, 1993 TAG: 9304180208
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by JOAN SCHROEDER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
`REVELATIONS' MIXES THEOLOGY, PASSION
REVELATIONS. By Sophy Burnham. Ballantine. $20."Revelations" is one of the most visually attractive books I've seen. The cover is rich scarlet, bearing a nice reproduction of Caravaggio's Conversion of St. Paul, bordered by embossed magenta vinework. It's an eye-catcher, a work of art - and beautifully evocative of the story within.
As she did in her best-selling "A Book of Angels," author Sophy Burhnam turns to religious visions for her subject matter. Set in the late 1950s in the fictional Virginia hunt-country town of Naughton, "Revelations" tells the story of a small, moneyed Episcopal parish when The Rev. Thomas Lewis Buckford arrives, bringing new ideas, a radical-Christian conscience and an unquenchable spiritual hunger.
People don't like the changes he makes in their service, and they don't trust his racial views.
It's clear from the start that Buckford doesn't fit into the wealth and complacency of the parish. And that he's not happy in his marriage to the straitlaced Priscilla, with her tightly bound hair and compulsively clean life. When he takes up with Elizabeth McEwen, a married parishoner, he's an easy target for his congregation's anger.
Tom and Elizabeth's love affair is believably fraught with guilt, a relationship spurred as much by a need for "a believing hope" as by raw sexual passion. As the novel proceeds, it's clear that the fire in the young minister's eye is what frightens his congregation more than anything else. And when he claims to have been visited by God, like Paul on the road to Damascus, he becomes intolerable to them.
You can see the end coming from a long way off - in fact, you get broad hints from the start. But Burnham is too good a writer to be transparent.
She chooses as her narrator a church vestryman and local businessman, John Woods, whose own spiritual quest is overlaid upon the story at hand. John is privy to everyone's confidence: Tom's because he was his parish confidant; Elizabeth's because he's her godfather and later receives her journals; the townspeople's because he's one of them.
John's own story is sometimes intrusive, and you have to suspend disbelief to buy the idea that anyone would hand over her personal journals to another, but the resulting complexity makes "Revelations" that much richer.
The novel isn't without flaws. The biggest of them is Burnham's proclivity for lengthy theological dialogue, to which only the most faithful reader will pay full attention. This, and a tendency toward repetition, makes the novel a good hundred pages longer than it has to be.
You may buy "Revelations" for its cover. But you'll read it for its courage and vision.
Joan Schroeder has a story in the anthology "Life on the Line."