The Stranger

A MILL, standing in from the road, made him pause.  The gray of his suit was whitened with dust, but it was a well-tailored suit, and you knew at a glance that it's owner could wear it.  When you looked at him, you noticed the face most of all: a face of character, a face that showed reserves of strength, a cultured face, penciled by some secret sorrow in lines that were firm but not hard.  They softened now, as he looked at the mill, and a certain wistfulness came into his face, like that with which a person looks at a sleeping child, or a man thinks of the time when the dew was on his dreams. Then, for a moment, a little smile played about his lips and the firm lines softened.

Thus begins The Stranger by Malachy G. Carroll

I should say first that I knew nothing about this novel before reading it.  When I saw the title and its 1952 copyright I automatically thought a mystery, complete with a murder, and a couple of genius detectives.  Was I ever wrong!  It was mysterious, and it also, in a way, remotely involved detectives, but I was still so very wrong!

Then I began to read.  I very quickly realized my mistake.  It opened lightly, with Irish joy and humor, and I read avidly, delighted to have found something so rare as this promised to be.  However, it proved to be ever so much rarer than I thought, even then. 

I don't know how to tell anything about this without giving it away.    The story is such a wonderful surprise that I wouldn't want it to be less so for anyone than it was for me.  At the same time I want everyone to read it, and how do you make someone want to read anything without telling them about it?  I can't tell you how many book recommendations I have seen on blogs, and thought, Well, that looks interesting and all, but I already have a book list ten miles long.  I don't think I'll get around to buying it any time soon, and promptly proceeded to forget it.  I don't want you to do the same with my recommendation of this book (which you can buy here, so do it now!).  I'll tell you a little, but I'll stop before it gets interesting ;)

A man with the light of Christ in his sad, compassionate eyes, wanders into an Irish town.  Nobody knows who he is, where he's from, or where he's going.  He's a daily communicant, a hard worker, and the children love him, so why does he avoid the good parish priest?  For a while the townspeople make many and various speculations as to his true identity.  Why do they talk to him and come away with no more information than they started with?  What is his secret?  They soon run out of inventive answers to their own questions, and leave him in peace, accepting him for his kindness and obvious love of the children.

It is beautifully Catholic, and has a depth and beauty I hadn't expected.  I laughed and cried with it.  I won't tell you any more except to share a couple of quotations with you.  Quotations that, while beautiful, won't spoil the story for you!  They aren't necessarily from the point of view of the protagonist.  Here you are!

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     "The Mother of God," he muttered, "never looked down her nose at the Magdalen." ...What a lovely phrase! he thought.  It had a strange beauty, as if, in the gloom about him, he had suddenly met the odor of a rose.  She was called a rose in the Litany.  It was a long time since he had remembered that.  Yes, that was it--Mystical Rose.  The idea became a prayer: the first prayer that had softened the hard places in his soul for many years.  And it had been put upon his lips by a street woman.  Such a grace was like a boomerang; it would probably return to the dejected, sodden girl who had been its pathetic instrument.  Some morning, the Communion dress would be white again.

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     Night had come on him, flowing like a river of darkness through the rent in his soul: lonely stretches of desolation lay before the eyes of his soul, and he sat before his desolation, holding the cold body of his dreams in his arms, as Mary had held her Son.  But his comparison was a whip of light cutting across his sorrow.  The thought of Mary can be as a drop of rich wine dropped into the brine of our sorrows to suffuse it as with the blood that filled the veins of God.