Several of the stories take place during the Covid lockdowns. The lockdowns provided—or for some, occasionally forced against their will—a level of space and stillness we otherwise rarely encounter in twenty-first century life. Many suddenly found themselves facing their thoughts, lives, and consciences in a way we can typically avoid in the hustle of life. In Smith’s stories, the lockdowns create space to focus on human response and the individual conscience in a setting and experience readers can immediately recognize.

Australia had especially severe lockdowns and curfews, and the stories reflect this reality. They are also filled with personal conflict of conscience. In “Lions Over the Bridge,” the narrator has lost his home because he won’t receive the Covid vaccine. “How Can We Know the Way” is about a woman’s funeral during lockdown. The second-person narrative focuses on a young man serving at the altar, preoccupied with the dead woman and her family who is not allowed to be with her because of contact limitations. In “Render Unto,” a different young man comes into conflict with his pastor because he refuses to wear a mask at Mass.

These stories, within the particularity of Covid lockdowns, bring up questions about what we ought to do in the face of conflicting goods. What ought we to do when a legitimate authority implements policy that we believe is wrong-headed or even dangerous? At what point are we to disobey? Several stories show characters butting up against these questions and coming to the conclusion that they ought to follow the dictums of their own consciences, following what they believe to be the true good in spite of contrary rulings of authority. Good fiction uses concrete, tangible situations that stand in as well for more universal realities, including realities of conscience and right and wrong, and Smith accomplishes this well in his Covid stories.

One final story that brings together these themes of faith and the demands it makes on our lives and conscience is “Mr. Humberstone’s Trial,” which follows a young man falsely accused of rape by a former girlfriend after she cannot accept his conversion from a sort of modern rationalism to Catholicism. The two have separated after Mr. Humberstone’s turbulent conversion, and the narrator tells us that:

A feeling of psychic weight that he could only describe as oppression by God came upon him, yet he knew that even the thought was blasphemous. God was a gentleman who did not force himself on you. Let no man say that God is tempting him into sin. Sometimes he avoided God for a few hours of relaxation, and he thought that all that was over, that he could go back to pleasant life. But of course, there was nothing else except atoms and he rushed back to God in fear. There was no middle path.

This line, “There was no middle path,” is central to understanding Smith’s work. There is no middle path for these characters, for the lives they live or, most essentially, in the world they inhabit. For Mr. Humberstone, there is either a God whom he must follow, demanding a major change to his life; or there is not, and there is no source of ultimate meaning in life. There is either God and meaning, or there is nothingness. Once he has plumbed reality, “crawling, a few knees and elbows at a time, drawn by an irresistible force” toward God and transcendent truth, there is no comfortable, casual existence left open to Mr. Humberstone, because “God’s hand is in everything.” Having accepted Catholicism through long study and against his own complacency, he must completely change his life to follow God, or accept a reality devoid of any meaning at all.

Shortly after the passage quoted above, we read:

Mr. Humberstone knew what the problem was. He was pursuing a subjective state of well-being through the feeling of faith. The important thing was to know that God was real no matter what he thought. Knowing this did not make him feel better.

Smith strikes so cleanly, so succinctly at a powerful truth here. We want both to know the truth and to feel good; to feel safe and comforted all the time. But knowledge is not the same as feeling, nor is it always comfortable, and the knowledge of faith and hope are subjected in us, imperfect beings, to bouts of fear and doubt—oftentimes because of our own sin and guilt. Our consciences are so often wracked with doubt and uncertainty, and yet there is no escaping some kind of action—for even inaction is a moral choice.

But through all of this, there is hope. Smith refuses to accept the distractions of modern life as holding all there is for us, or to accept a dismissive view of the soul. He shows us the unavoidable doubt of the modern world, and calls us to be faithful in spite of that. He demands that we, in the words of Humberstone, seek “God’s hand in everything.”