I seem to be well and truly fixed in my exploration of so-called modern classics. This one was an audiobook, first published in 1989, and one of the few novels by Hilary Mantel I had not yet read.
This brilliant, satirical black comedy of a novel takes place in the fictional town of Fetherhaughton, a cotton-mill town in the north of England, probably pretty similar to the one where Mantel herself grew up. Its narrow, dull, but not wholly unsympathetic inhabitants are mostly Roman Catholic, and their church is presided over by one Father Angwin. A gentle thoughtful man, Angwin does his best for his parishioners despite (or because of?) the fact that he lost his faith some twenty years earlier. As the novel begins, he receives an unwelcome visit from the Bishop ('a modern man', as Angwin calls him), who brings up the idea, horrifying to the priest, that the Mass could be spoken in the vernacular ('You mean they could actually understand what we are saying?'). Worse still is that the bishop instructs him to take down almost all the many statues of obscure saints with which the church is filled - the parishioners love them, and what, after all, is he supposed to do with them? 'His Corpulence', as the priest privately refers to him, threatens to send Angwin a forward-looking curate to bring his practices up to date.
Shortly afterwards, there's a knock at the front door. Angwin's housekeeper, Agnes Dempsey, opens it, to find a young man on the doorstep: 'My name is Fludd', he says, 'I've come to stay'. Of course this must be the new curate, thinks Agnes, but at the same time she experiences a strange sensation:
Deep within her, behind her cardigan and her blouse and her petticoat trimmed with scratchy nylon lace, behind her interlock vest and freckled skin, Miss Dempsey sensed a slow movement, a tiny spiral shift of matter, as if, at the very moment the curate spoke, a change had occurred: a change so minute as to baffle description, but rippling out, in its effect, to infinity.
This is only the beginning of Fludd's strange, powerful influence on the community. He seems to be able to see into peoples' hearts and minds, and to root out hypocrisy. Angwin rapidly confesses his lack of faith to the young man and is deeply comforted that he's at last been able to speak of it. Mother Perpetua, the monstrous, cruel Mother Superior of the local convent, hopes he will be her ally against her arch-enemy Angwin, but Fludd is having nothing of it. Most of all, though, Fludd has a beneficent influence on a young Irish nun, Sister Philomena. Forced into a convent by her overbearing mother, Philomena has been banished to England because her mother and the local priest falsely claimed that her dermatitis was a stigmata. A sweet-natured, nervous girl, relentlessly bullied by the rest of the nuns and by Perpetua, Philomena worries endlessly about the 'moral questions' raised by her Catholic faith: can a foreigner who speaks no English take an interpreter to confession? can a medical student's unwanted protestant bones be buried in a Catholic graveyard? Fluid takes the girl under his wing, and his influence brings about what is, apparently, the only happy ending in any of Mantel's novels.
Despite Mantel's disclaimer at the beginning that 'The church in this story bears some but not much resemblance to the Roman Catholic Church in the real world, c. 1956', it's clear that she's getting off her chest a good deal of animus against the religion she was born and raised in. But there's so much more here than just an anti-Catholic rant. Central, obviously, is the mysterious figure of Fludd. Some people think he represents the devil, though clearly everything he brings about works wholly for good. But he certainly has special powers. Nobody can remember what he looks like when he's not present; he's never seen to eat or drink, though food somehow just disappears from his plate; Angwin's whiskey bottle remains full even after an evening of drinking. It soon becomes clear to the reader that he's not a priest, though the only person to recognise this is Philomena. Actually we only have to read Mantel's own note to the novel to see what she had in mind: she explains that Fludd is based on his own namesake, Robert Fludd, a 16th-century astrologer, occult philosopher and alchemist. As she says, In these days,'he no longer worked in metal, but practiced on human nature; an art less predictable, more gratifying, more dangerous'. Thus, as the fictional Fludd himself declares,
My coming here has changed things for good. Falseness can longer be endured, truth must out. There must be new combinations within the heart, passions, new notions never before formed.
I really loved this novel and recommend it highly - if you're into audio books, it was very well read on Audible - if not, it would obviously be a great read.
