'Celestial Fireworks' – Father Malachy's Miracle (1931)

Abstract

In his satirical novel, 'Father Malachy's Miracle' (1931), Bruce Marshall (24 June 1899–18 June 1987), the Edinburgh-born author of over forty books, presents the reader with an elderly Benedictine monk, Fr Malachy Murdoch, who has been sent from his monastery in the Scottish Highlands to improve the singing and the manners on the altar of St Margaret's Church in Edinburgh – like many of the episodes in the novel, Marshall's characters, thinly-disguised, are based on 'real' people – in spite of the author's protestations to the contrary.<br/> After a chance but testy meeting with a dapper Episcopalian clergyman who challenges the monk to prove that miracles can really happen. Malachy impulsively jettisons his brief and accepts the challenge, deciding to petition God to move an adjacent dancehall of ill repute (along with its clientele) onto the windy summit of the Bass Rock, a volcanic island some twenty miles away in East Lothian. Inexplicably, the displacement immediately becomes a tourist attraction – for which Malachy is roundly admonished by a cardinal newly-arrived from Rome.<br/> He begins to grasp the wider implications of what he has done. He regrets his hasty reaction and implores God to restore the seedy dancehall to its former site beside the Church of Saint Margaret of Scotland – he is left with an abiding sense of guilt and failure. Interviewed in Rome by the literary critic Luigi Silori in 1959, Marshall confided that 'the author should not preach. This is why the clergy generally does not understand me very well – because they expect me to preach, and I don't want to do this.'<br/> So why has this comic masterpiece been almost forgotten? Recently, new research into 'Father Malachy's Miracle' has revealed just how closely Marshall's deft fictionalisation imitated real life – the thin line between fact and Marshall's fiction.