Maryanne Confoy

Few Australian authors have been so prolific or so well-rewarded for their labours: twenty-six novels, as well as plays and a reluctant memoir; not to mention advances – in the 1960s – of hundreds of thousands of American dollars per book. How many of our writers have sold copies of their works in tens of millions, let alone been translated into twenty-seven languages at last count? None has been so prescient in his fiction, whether predicting papal succession, international terrorism, the quagmire of Vietnam, or another Arab–Israeli war. Yet the author of whom all this is more or less true is largely without critical honour in his own country. The author is Morris West (1916–99), who had the distinction of emulating Charles Dickens by dying at his desk with an unfinished manuscript before him. In West’s case, this was The Last Confession (2001), another of his attempts to understand the brave heretic and Renaissance martyr Giordano Bruno. Of Bruno, West wrote ‘the better I knew him, the more modern I found him’.

‘Until the last decade or so,’ writes Maryanne Confoy, ‘most people thought of spirituality, if they thought of it at all, as something for other people.’ It is certainly true that there is a new and quite sudden interest in spirituality in this country, and this book on the spirituality of Morris West is a timely addition to the growing tradition of – what can we call it? – ‘wisdom writing’ in contemporary Australia. It might be a symptom of the turn of the millennium, it might be a reaction to the craziness and fragmentation of the modern world, it might be a sign of cultural disorientation and the search for roots – however we attempt to account for it, spirituality and the quest for meaning is back on the public agenda and is in great demand. Just ask your local bookseller.