I read this book in tandem with Pemberley Shades, which I blogged about a couple of days ago. It would be hard to imagine two more disparate novels. While the Austen sequel was (relatively) light and bright and sparkling, and set out simply to entertain, this is one of the most serious, and one of the saddest, novels I have read for a long time. A friend gave it to me for my birthday, and I'm really glad she did, as I don't think I would have been drawn to buying it if I had picked it up in a bookshop -- the blurb does not really do it justice:
When an English parish priest takes over a small Scottish parish, not everyone is ready to accept him. He makes friends with some local youths, Mark and Lisa, and clashes with a world he can barely understand.
Of course this is the bare bones of the story, but it comes nowhere near what is really going on in this astonishing, thought-provoking, and beautifully written novel. Father David Anderton, in his early fifties, has moved from a safe and unchallenging twenty years in a Blackpool parish to the 'darkness' of the working-class Scottish parish of Dalgarnock, 'where hope is like a harebell ringing at night'. In his pleasant, civilised rectory, where he sips fine wine and reads serious books, he forms a friendship with his housekeeper Mrs Poole, an intelligent, self-educated woman, and together they plan the planting of a garden full of old roses. Outside, though, are the council houses, the factories, and the people -- enough of them Catholic to more or less fill the church on a Sunday. Invited to visit the local school, David gets to know some of the more difficult and disaffected youth, and is gradually drawn into spending time with them. It is the relationship he develops with Mark -- intelligent, angry, and rebellious -- that has, in the end, disastrous consequences.
There is so much one could say about this book -- it would be a wonderful novel to discuss in a book club or reading group. Like the best literature -- the best art, I should say -- it defies you to make simple judgments. There is no black and white here. It could be read as an attack on the imposed celibacy of the Roman Catholic church, or on the over-refined, elitist men who are at the heads of it. But conversely it is also a terrible indictment of the world we live in, where the tabloid press and an inadequate education system has produced a population incapable of escaping their own prejudice and class hatred. Mark, as a product of that world, is a fascinating character: given the right conditions, you know he could have done something with his life, and yet, at the end, we learn he is going to join the army. The fact that he is so obviously drawn to David's intelligence and culture, while at the same time mocking and repudiating them, and that he is at least partly responsible for what eventually happens, is part of the wonderful complexity of this plot, in which nothing is completely straightforward. As for David himself, readers will have to make up their own minds about how to see him -- flawed, confused, well-meaning, and ultimately tragic, he is someone who will stay with me for a long time, as will this remarkable book.
