'Dak il-Makakk ta' Kappillan'
Author: Tuse Costa
Publisher: Self-published / 2025
Pages: 814
In the 1970s, when I was at Il-Hajja Press, I got interested in the operations of the printing press.
It wasn't my role (and probably I stepped on some toes in the process) and I had absolutely no training or expertise in the matter neither in printing processes nor in accounting.
The press was an old collection of cold metal machines which used to be called Empire Press when they were still at the Catholic Institute in Floriana. Bought from the meagre profits of people's savings.
Offset was coming in but this press was still cold metal and concentrated around the production of two newspapers, Lehen is-Sewwa and from 1 January 1970, Il-Hajja.
It was here that I met for the first time, Tuse Costa, a shy teacher from Luqa who came up with a novel on Il-Kappillan.
Those were the hot days of the Church's battles with Dom Mintoff's MLP. Costa's novels were loosely based on the novels by Giovanni Guareschi about Don Camillo, a parish priest in the red Emilia province where the Communist Party was in power but where the church was equally powerful.
The Don Camillo novels were later turned into films with Fernandel as the priest and Gino Cervi as the red mayor.
Costa's kappillan novels were not quite in the Guareschi mode but they proved to be quite popular.
The early Tuse Costa books included Dak l-Imbierek ta' Kappillan (1971), Il-Kappillan jerga' jaghmilha (1973), Il-Parlament tal-Kappillan (1976) and Il-Kappillan u l-MLP (1977).
The picture that accompanies this review is not the cover of the Omnibus edition but like it taken from the earlier Dak l-Imbierek ta' Kappillan with just a slight change.
Now, after a hiatus of several years, Tuse and his Kappillan have reappeared with this door-stopper of a book, 800+ pages, quite heavy to hold in your hands while you read about escapade after escapade of the wily kappillan. Coming to think of it, this Omnibus edition contains a number of books that have already been published separately. Il-Kappillan ma jmut qatt, Il-Kappillan Imsallab, Il-Kappillan Isellem, il-Gimgha Mqaddsa tal-Kappillan, and Il-Milied tal-Kappillan. They are variously described as Novelli and one Rumanz.
The series is located in rural Malta, with two festa partiti, shadowing Malta's split between Nationalists and Socialists, a rural parish still focused on agriculture and a people which still flocks to the church and structures its life around the Church's liturgical year like Good Friday and Christmas.
In other words, a Malta that has become extinct for many of us (though it surprisingly it still survives in the south).
Having done some homework I suspect this is an omnibus edition containing previously published books in one volume.
There is a word in the book's title - makakk (crafty). The book portrays the kappillan as the king-pin of the village, wheeling and dealing to keep the various priests, two band clubs and their members, plus a collection of subservient Catholic organisations, etc under his control and happy.
Obviously, this is far removed from the concerns of the real parish priests in today's Malta.
The Costa kappillan is into everything, from organizing the Good Friday procession to trying to get the bishop's permission to enlarge the church. He is not averse to making statues or painting Baroque art.
Like Guareschi's Peppone the head of the Socialist party club becomes the kappillan's bete noire but even here there is a change when this Socialist becomes infatuated after a young and intelligent young girl and forgets his wife.
On the other hand, the Nationalist president of the other club, an Italian aristocrat with an improbable name has his own marital trouble too.
And so it goes on, story after story. 'Tales from a Malta that's no longer' could be an alternative title of the book.
But in the later part of the volume, as inspiration lags and the stories tend to become repetitive, I started feeling that here, locked in the Kappillan series, was an author just waiting to be unharnessed.
In so many pages there is only one clear mistake that I could find, towards the end of the book where the author mistakes Botticelli for Michelangelo (pg 787).
But there is one episode that I feel rather strongly about. On page 144 the author mentions the 1960s trauma when the post-Conciliar church 'degraded' some popular saints like St George and St Catherine to the second division of saints because it said their lives were based on unsubstantiated history.
Costa mentions the priests of the parishes involved, Dun Gerald in Qormi and Dun Pantaljun (name, not surname) in Zejtun, Dun Pawl Pace (later a lawyer) in Zurrieq, Mons Mikiel Cefai in Victoria and seems to hint that just like the kappillan in the book substituted an animal's bones when some relics went missing that roughly the same happened when the popular saints were degraded to the second division. In other words, faith is everything, even when based on an untruth.
In my time I was critical of many of the priests mentioned but they never tried to palm off animal bones for saints' relics. Now that they have been named, the insinuation is offensive and anyway untrue.