SOURCE: Elie, Paul. “Smells and Bells.” New Republic, no. 4221 (11 December 1995): 39-41.

In the following review, Elie argues that Tóibín fails to bridge his personal religious experience with his critical observations in The Sign of the Cross, resulting in “an account of strangers scarcely met, a pilgrimage barely begun.”

The lapsed Catholic is “as boring a figure as the stage Irishman, and sometimes the same figure,” Anthony Burgess declared in his memoirs.

What makes him a bore is his lachrymosity, especially in drink, about being a bad son who has struck his mother and dare not go home. There is also the matter, also in his cups, of claiming to belong to an international club to which he will not pay his subscription (this, in the form of obligatory communion, falls due every Easter).

Yet the lapsed Catholic's claim that he still belongs to the Church, Burgess...