Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
Stella is a prostitute who, in the course of her duties, heals seriously disabled clients. Kind and unassuming she thinks little of this extraordinary gift and she might have remained unseen and unknown had not one of her successful “cures” exposed her in the confessional, and that involved Father Brown (ex-Navy Seal with a grey brush cut): a priest with a conscience - who alerted his bishop.
In no time the Vatican was aware that the Church had a new saint, a girl who could work miracles, and an American one at that. Handled carefully, this could be an earth-shattering event.
But there was a whisper concerning methodology: how was the miracle achieved? Any hint of sex meant disqualification for a living saint. On the other hand, if dead, the girl would be a martyr. Her past could be pre-fabricated: not another Mary Magdalene then but the Virgin Stella, dying sensationally, the ultimate media scoop.
The American cardinal was tasked with the appropriate mission. Lazy and sybaritic he entrusted it to his aide, another beautiful woman who kept a black panther in her loft and had killed more men than she could count. Not all of them personally of course; she had her own heavies, the Bronski brothers, who had honed their trade as mercenaries in Africa. They were briefed and set on the trail.
In America’s Deep South, now informed by way of some reverse intelligence system augmented by the warning of her closest friend, a fortune teller, that she’s a marked woman, Stella reluctantly disappears. Meanwhile Father Brown, - stricken with the sudden awareness that all this was the result of his own stupidity and sin (whichever way you look at it) of betraying the secrets of the confessional – sets out to find her, heavily armed.
And so begins what would constitute the sex interest in a traditional novel but since this one is all sex what follows can pass as an idyll, an episode in a road movie complete with wildlife. From their fraught encounter on a Georgian barrier island where albatrosses soar above the trees they go on the run in Stella’s battered RV to Florida and a sylvan bivouac and a giant sequoia shading their tent among the alligators. Like people in a B-movie of the thirties they banter and bicker primly: dialogue intended to convey mutually unrequited lust. Keeping one step ahead of the Bronskis and the Press and a trail of laterally damaged victims the pair flee from Florida to Nevada to climax spectacularly at Cesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.
There’s no plot really; Holy F*ck says it all. No plot, only action. It’s a diatribe against the Catholic Church, a satire using shock tactics. It’s clever: ribaldry and a maudlin style shot through with Freudian and classical allusions, even wit in the Latin tags. The author knows what he’s doing but who is he doing it for?
Momentarily diverting but ultimately repetitive.
Editor’s Note: translated into English by writer Sam Taylor, who has translated more than 70 books from French, including Laurent Binet’s HHhH and Leïla Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny. Born in Nottinghamshire, England, in 1970, Sam Taylor began his career as a journalist with The Observer. He now lives in Texarkana, Texas, America
