Forty years after he made the occult an enthralling and engrossing fare with his 1971 novel The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty is back with “the most personally important novel” of his career, The Redemption.
The Exorcist’s brand of horror, its plotline, themes and texture spawned many copycats and with its movie adaptation by William Friedkin in 1973, it deservedly went on to have a cult following. This sub-genre of horror, popularised by The Exorcist, is, however, difficult to define.
True, The Exorcist was an examination of the nature of evil and its perennial confrontation with good. We know about this battle through the story of Reagan McNeil, daughter of Chris McNeil, a famous actress, who is possessed by a demon. It’s a Jesuit priest, Father Damien Karras, who brings the innocent girl out of the vortex of eerie physical and psychological occurrences. Good triumphs over evil. There’s redemption at the end.
But after reading The Exorcist, you wondered: Is it out-and-out horror fiction? Is it a detective story? Is it a theological mystery? Blatty’s blend of all these elements in a power-packed narrative, suffused with the right dose of humour and “human” touch, not to forget his philosophical meanderings here and there, made The Exorcist go beyond the realm of a thriller purely about the nature of evil. Indeed, The Exorcist is as much about good vs. evil as it is about the corrosive power of guilt, and the redeeming, and redemptive, power of love.
The Redemption, in terms of its overarching themes, doesn’t travel far from The Exorcist. Though it is not about demonic possession, it echoes the familiar world of The Exorcist in the many ways it evokes the powers of faith and love, sin and forgiveness. There are gruesome murders, fierce revenges, and from its mysterious start to revelatory finish, you frantically keep looking for clues to solve the intricate web of suspense Blatty weaves with tremendous dexterity and flair.
Though there are times when the effort to keep an eye on the clues leave you exasperated as Blatty goes on excursions of his own.
When the novel opens, we are in the Albania of the 1970s. It’s here that we meet the American “agent from hell” named Paul Dimiter. In part 1 of the novel that traverses some its 70 odd pages, we get to know about the Prisoner who “radiates mystery”. He has not uttered a word even after seven days of excruciating torture. His nails are wrenched, he is hit repeatedly in the groin with a rubber truncheon, but he absorbs it all with bewildering stoicism, blazing in moments of enormous pain with a “terrifying inner light”.
The interrogator, Colonel Vlora, a man given to myriad dreams and visitations, doesn’t know who he is dealing with. He has used every method in the torture book. To no avail. The prisoner wouldn’t utter a word. Who must this man be? Speculations abound.
The interrogator’s quandary is confounded by the looming suspicion that the Prisoner might be the “spectral and unsettling” Selca Deccani, who died many, many years ago, but was believed to be “roaming the hills seeking momentary life in mistaken recollections”.
It takes a Chinese Army medical officer, Major Liu Ng Tsu, a drug-hypnosis interrogation expert, to get the Prisoner talking. He comes up with many stories, six in all, about his identity. And the horror of it all is that the polygraph machine corroborates all of the Prisoner’s stories. When Part 1 ends, the Prisoner manages to escape, leaving behind a trail of blood and a few dead bodies. The action then shifts to Jerusalem, that favourite place of all thrillers of this kind, where we meet neurologist Moses Mayo and nurse Samia at the Hadassah Hospital, among a cast of other unusual characters like Sergeant Major Peter V. Meral, who, along with Dimiter, (spoilers! spoilers!) holds the key to a lot of suspense. Dimiter, you discover much later in the book, was on a secret mission to Albania.
Blatty fleshes out his characters well and the narrative shifts frequently from their current circumstance to the backgrounds they come from. In delineating their horror and humanity, Blatty doesn’t merely shock and awe. He engages.
In The Redemption, Blatty gives his characters a free run. And yet they are chained by Blatty’s own engagement with ideas of faith and forgiveness, guilt and redemption, crime and punishment. In some sense, that preordains his characters’ destinies.