Books in Brief: The Celebrant

The Celebrant, by Charles Turner (Servant Publications, 144 pp., $8.95)

‘Yes, I rather be here than any place I know.” W. C. Handy in his “Beale Street Blues” got down something vital about the rawer districts of Memphis; it would apply as well to an actual event that occurred at an earlier period in that city’s history. This novel is based on the true story of a young Episcopal priest, Louis Schuyler, who experiences what may have been a “call” and comes to Memphis in 1878 during a yellow-fever epidemic. Once there, and against the advice of doctors, he ventures into the “deeper” neighborhoods where the pestilence is worst because “[it] was impossible to draw a line when streets were unfamiliar and somebody came for help and led the way.” Mr. Turner’s spare prose skillfully includes just enough vanished features of a familiar landscape to permit the reader to enter into the scene and to explore its dimensions. The dialogue is historically specific but does not restrict the universality of the theme; when the priest comes upon a fever-ridden but alert veteran of the Devil’s Den at Gettysburg and is queried, “How many did the sharpshooter get today?” he is shocked by this bitter naming of God. Louis Schuyler is young and callow and has already suffered mental breakdowns, so the hard questions others put to him, and the worse ones he turns upon himself, do make the reader wonder if he actually is in Memphis on God’s urging. But even as quicksilver emotions are tugging at him, Schuyler does seem to grow. And at a funeral service, reading from the Book of Common Prayer, he is seen to retain his faith as a Christian, an Episcopalian, and a priest: “Louis thanked God that words were given him now. He didn’t have to pull them out of himself. He didn’t have to pick through Scripture and strain for the guidance of the Spirit, didn’t have to thumb here and there and fan pages at the bereaved company, didn’t have to depend on prayers from the top of his head. Open in his hand was a solid gift of the Church—or, as he .thought of it at this moment, a gift from God to the Church, for a distilled grammar of faith and practice. . . . Who could improve the Order for the Burial of the Dead?” To read Camus’s The Plague is to be left muttering, “Yes, but” at the bleak philosophy lowering over that tale. This novel of a plague in another city, in another time, is, ultimately, heartening.

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Bert Culver

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The Celebrant, by Charles Turner (Servant Publications, 144 pp., $8.95)

‘Yes, I rather be here than any place I know.” W. C. Handy in his “Beale Street Blues” got down something vital about the rawer districts of Memphis; it would apply as well to an actual event that occurred at an earlier period in that city’s history. This novel is based on the true story of a young Episcopal priest, Louis Schuyler, who experiences what may have been a “call” and comes to Memphis in 1878 during a yellow-fever epidemic. Once there, and against the advice of doctors, he ventures into the “deeper” neighborhoods where the pestilence is worst because “[it] was impossible to draw a line when streets were unfamiliar and somebody came for help and led the way.” Mr. Turner’s spare prose skillfully includes just enough vanished features of a familiar landscape to permit the reader to enter into the scene and to explore its dimensions. The dialogue is historically specific but does not restrict the universality of the theme; when the priest comes upon a fever-ridden but alert veteran of the Devil’s Den at Gettysburg and is queried, “How many did the sharpshooter get today?” he is shocked by this bitter naming of God. Louis Schuyler is young and callow and has already suffered mental breakdowns, so the hard questions others put to him, and the worse ones he turns upon himself, do make the reader wonder if he actually is in Memphis on God’s urging. But even as quicksilver emotions are tugging at him, Schuyler does seem to grow. And at a funeral service, reading from the Book of Common Prayer, he is seen to retain his faith as a Christian, an Episcopalian, and a priest: “Louis thanked God that words were given him now. He didn’t have to pull them out of himself. He didn’t have to pick through Scripture and strain for the guidance of the Spirit, didn’t have to thumb here and there and fan pages at the bereaved company, didn’t have to depend on prayers from the top of his head. Open in his hand was a solid gift of the Church—or, as he .thought of it at this moment, a gift from God to the Church, for a distilled grammar of faith and practice. . . . Who could improve the Order for the Burial of the Dead?” To read Camus’s The Plague is to be left muttering, “Yes, but” at the bleak philosophy lowering over that tale. This novel of a plague in another city, in another time, is, ultimately, heartening.