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The Holy
by Daniel Quinn
(Context Books, $25.00, 413 pages, hardcover; published in October
2002.)
Two old Jewish men belong to a chess club in Chicago. One of them,
Aaron, is wealthy  and
an amateur scholar. The other, Howard, is a widowed private investigator.
Aaron hires Howard to find the false gods that Israel worshipped for
600 years when, in antiquity, it turned away from the God of Scripture.
"Nowhere does it say they don't exist," says Aaron. "What it says is
they're false gods ... gods not to be trusted."
Howard turns him down, but Aaron insists, offering him a generous fee.
Howard finally agrees to take the case for a month to see if he can
get anywhere, all the while thinking that this is a fool's errand. He
has no idea where or how to start looking into such a strange case.
But because Howard takes an active interest in the old gods (or whatever
they are), they also take an interest in him.
Meanwhile, these mysterious creatures are paying close attention to
a young Indiana boy, Tim, whose father is going through a devastating
midlife crisis. Howard finds himself helping Tim, or at least trying
to.
Daniel Quinn's The Holy is a mosaic of interlocking quests,
robustly written and filled with astonishing ideas. It keeps flirting
with generic conventions -- of thrillers, of horror fiction, of new-age
novels -- but, every time it threatens to fall into cliché, it
pulls an unexpected trick that plunges it into deeper and more startling
waters.
Quinn's critics have faulted his earlier novels for being too didactic.
In The Holy, he seamlessly integrates his philosophical concerns
-- about consumerism, the environment, the pitfalls of religious faith
-- into a profoundly satisfying story, both grand and intimate, that
bristles with excitement.
Originally published
in The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 25 January 2003.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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