Evil: A Novel

‘Sex, silence and sin’, this is what newly appointed professor, Dee P Scrutari, writes in her notebook as she turns her anthropological gaze on the tribe of ‘non-reproducing males’ who dominate St Jude’s, a prestigious Jesuit liberal arts college in the north east of the US. Something is awry. What happened to the previous occupant of her newly painted office? Professor Scrutari’s fieldwork begins. Her notebooks fill. The mystery mounts: disturbing odours, turbulent faculty meetings, a strange ginger cat, tenure politics and intrigue. The mix is enriched by secret student alliances, predatory priests, the end of a marriage and a new love, a faction-ridden Religious Studies department, a radical mass and a dissident feminist liturgy. The determined anthropologist doodles and decodes the symbols and signs of evil as she teams up with a band of colleagues marginalised by the department – a liberation theology nun, a gay priest, and a Jew – and three feisty women students. They strategize and sleuth as they attempt to solve a number of campus mysteries. Evil , Dee declares, is visceral, pervasive, subtle, not an abstract conceit at all.
Evil is about now.‘ Evil’ is a novel full of vivid characters you know, or want to know. At once funny, witty, sobering, profound and provocative, full of affection for the academic world Diane Bell so lovingly describes, and is concerned to nurture against the darker forces she seeks to identify and expose.