I Have Kissed Your Lips (Gerard Windsor, UQP, $24.95 pb, ISBN 0702234761, October) ***

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Tales about both fallen priests and incest seem to exert an endless fascination on the Australian mind. We are rightly shocked and horrified when we hear stories of abuse, but when the issue is not paedophilia but sex between consenting adults, the lines become blurred. Why should a priest, who is a man like any other, be denied sensual pleasures considered normal in anyone else? In this novel, a young priest falls into temptation with an older married woman and, upon her husband’s mysterious death, marries her. During their first year together, and her pregnancy, he has an affair with her doctor. The relationship survives the death of their child—they seem bound together in another way—and slowly a possible truth emerges about their shared history. Gerard Windsor has certainly never been afraid to court controversy, and this book will no doubt spark debates of its own, but for this reader anyway, the novel was slightly unsatisfying. Not for its remarkably Oedipal plot, which skates over very thin moral ice throughout, nor for the narrative description, which is at times sublime, but for the dialogue, which I found turgid and unrealistic. Overall however, he deserves praise for his subtle handling of such delicate material.

Lachlan Jobbins is a freelance reviewer and ex-bookseller

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2004, Thorpe-Bowker