The Ease of Offending

I was recently given a copy of Glenn Cooper's The Devil Will Come by a friend who works at a literary festival–it was a Speculative Fiction book, which is a genre he typically doesn't read and one I often enjoy. Cooper's book is centred around the Vatican and the Catholic faith, but unlike Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, the Catholics are not the villians of the piece. Indeed the heroine we follow is a young nun, who is tasked with uncovering the mysteries of a secret sect who have vowed to destroy the Catholic faith in the name of money and power, guided by the true power of astrology. Apparently, we've had the symbol for Pices wrong for a very long time.

Initially, the reading experience was very promising. Cooper's text was well put together and the plot was compelling. There was a great drive and flow to the action that kept things chugging along, with enough twists and turns that were neither overtly foreshadowed nor spelt out in great detail before they became relevant to the plot, which has always been my greatest gripe when reading a mystery story. The characters too were well formed, although I still personally wonder if the device of creating a character (or characters) and writing from their perspective for the specific purpose of having them die in an attempt to heighten the emotional impact of their (usually messy) deaths is one that is worth doing. Personally I feel a bit cheated when I recognise the device. Still, the major characters were very well crafted, and I particularly enjoyed the interactions of the protagonist and her family, as well as the look back to the times of the Roman Emperor Nero and Elizabethan England.

**WARNING: THE FOLLOWING TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS**

However (and you knew there was going to be a 'however'), I was jarred out of the book and the narrative on several occasions, and I personally felt like homosexuality was used in the book as a shorthand for the concepts of 'evil', 'debauched' or 'lesser individuals unworthy of due process', which I personally was unsettled by. It also made me ask if this was a deliberate plot device (given Occam's Razor and that one of the situations involved the historical figure of Christopher Marlowe), and I was being overly sensitive, or whether this is a prime example of latent homophobia. Now as a proponent of diversity, I have to admit it is crucial to accept that there is nothing that prevents anyone in the GLBT community from being a villian, or bad, debauched or just plain evil. I am also hesitant to demand that any story where a gay character is penned as evil must be balanced by one that is not. I suppose what I object to in this particular work, is the idea that homosexuality is given a token treatment in a 'that's so gay' fashion. As a successful author, it is . . . → Read More: The Ease of Offending