Like the monk in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, who will tell a tale "trewly," Rougeau, a cloistered monk, has written an autobiographical first novel that traces the first seven years in the life of a contemporary Cistercian monk. As a young man, Paul Seneschal feels drawn to the St. Norbert Abbey outside of Winnipeg. When he sees the streak of a meteor, he takes it as a sign from God that he should become a postulant, though his mother is horrified by the idea that her 19-year-old would opt for reclusion and chastity over family life. At the abbey, which has a rule of silence, Paul slowly acclimates himself to using sign language, works with the other 40 monks on the farm and sleeps in a common dormitory. Upon taking his vows, he is given the name Antoine. At times, Antoine wonders if this abbey is austere enough—there is a comic episode involving an ecumenical visit from some Tibetan monks, which marks the summit of his romantic fervor. He experiences another kind of fervor when he lusts after a burly fellow monk, but that infatuation resolves itself harmlessly. The abbey inhabitants are getting older, and many of them are seriously senile. One becomes a pyromaniac at 76, killing himself and nearly burning down the monastery. The book closes with the abbey moving to a new farm, as Antoine reflects: "All along, the real monastic life of a greater scheme had forced him to practice more than he had thought possible. Detachment, self-denial, charity, all these things that make saints, these had come to him in unanticipated ways." Though it doesn't hold a candle to Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest, this is a solid, refreshingly humorous account of a life of faith. Agent, Richard Parks. (May 17)
