May 2011 Book Review

Motherless by Brian J. Gail

Book Review by Eileen Love

Motherless is the eagerly awaited second book in the trilogy by Catholic business executive turned fiction author, Brian J. Gail. Fatherless, the first in the trilogy, (next one is Childless, due out in fall of 2011) introduced us to parishioners, so vividly drawn and so like your neighbors in the cul-de-sac that you forget they’re fictional. They occupy the parish of St. Martha’s pastored by Father John Sweeney. In the last book, we saw Father Sweeney coming to grips with his own weaknesses in the area of Church doctrine. In this book, happily, he is stronger and a more reliable moral resource to the people in his flock.

Fatherless dealt with the issues of woefully under-informed Catholics trying to live happy lives and wondering why things didn’t seem to fit. Motherless takes place a generation later and visits the sticky moral issues that are a natural outgrowth of an insidious contraceptive mentality and a culture that is marked by moral confusion. Motherless takes on the themes of reproductive technology, frozen embryos, stem cell research, international trafficking in human parts, end-of-life issues, and the tragedy of how individuals in big business can be complicit in evil, often without realizing it. Mainly, Motherless makes us ponder the jaw dropping consequences of technology operating apart from any moral reference point.

The main characters are all back, alive as ever and twenty years older: Maggie Kealey, divorced mother and nurse now CEO of a large Catholic hospital; Michael Burns, the colossally rich New York advertising exec, and Joe Delgado, CFO of a biotech company. All have families and desire to live truly faith-filled lives but things get interesting when it becomes apparent that there are high costs associated with challenging the culture of death.

Something remarkable about Motherless is how eerily familiar it all is. You know these people, these are issues you live with every day. But Motherless invites readers to revisit these familiar scenes from the perspective of a well-informed Catholic. The author gets to the heart of our morally ailing culture with the literary precision of a scalpel slicing directly into the infected area. It makes for a compelling read.  If it seems a little preachy, it is, but Brian J. Gail is trying to do in 500 pages what catechetics has done poorly for two generations.

While the message of Fatherless resonated so well with the older generation, as it condemned the devastating fallout in the aftermath of Vatican II, younger readers will really “get” Motherless. The issues are up-to-the minute and the scenarios reflect the predominance of fuzzy moral thinking that infests the culture and with which young people are all too familiar. It is part of his success that Gail demonstrates empathy for the dilemmas of modern man: the pressing need to generate income, the pain of infertility, the difficulties in relationships. Still, he reminds us that in all these cases, there are real choices to be made, the consequences of which are eternal.

Overall, the book’s message is uplifting. Whatever the trials of the characters in Motherless, we are left with the truth that this life passes away. To have lived our days on earth in love, marked by integrity and self-gift, all with an eye toward our eternal destination of union with God, is to have seized the message to finding lasting happiness. It is a message that Brian J. Gail’s Motherless teaches well.