Etienne de Montety

A brisk, lightly-built novel based on the real events of the terrorist attack on a church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in June 2016, when two young men calling themselves Jihadists burst into the church during mass, killing the priest and seriously injuring one of his parishioners.

De Montety moves the action to a small town in South-West France and takes us separately through the "typically French" backgrounds of the various protagonists — the teenage boys (one rugby-playing middle-class, one juvenile-delinquent) who have grown up in non-religious families and been drawn into Islamic radicalism via their perception of their marginalised identity as Rebeus; the septuagenarian Algeria-veteran priest; the nun who has retired from long service in a children's home in Soweto; the policeman of Indochinese descent. He is at his best when he's telling us about the priest and the nun, with Bernanos always hovering in the background, but the touch is so light and the approach so objective and journalistic that it's hard to see where we get to the tipping point when the tragic and wasteful attack becomes inevitable, or how it could have been prevented. Maybe de Montety takes us as close as a white, middle-class reader could get to understanding how a young person with no Islamic background could be drawn into something like that, but it isn't very close.… (altro)