SOURCE: "In Time of Plague," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4465, October 28, 1988, p. 1211.

In the following review, Kaveney provides a mixed appraisal of A Recent Martyr.

Comparisons between Sacred and Profane Love are unfashionable in an agnostic world; but Valerie Martin's novel of plague and self-sacrifice in some near-future New Orleans ambiguously reinstates them, in order to do some serious semi-feminist thinking about the possibilities for self-development offered by the cloistered life, and the self-abasement involved in the pursuit of sensually based erotic relationships. Emma and Pascal flirt with the violence of knives in their affair, but with no knife as real as that which martyrs their acquaintance, Claire.

Pascal is an attractive, idle sensualist whose only real commitment is to opposing his father's fervent Catholicism; "Non serviam" has become less a principle than an excuse for drifting. Emma is bored with a worthless job and ripe for...