There is David’s mother, a widow and successful novelist. There is Bishop Gerard, the man who appointed David to his Dalgarnock post but earns his mild contempt by presuming to ‘protect the world from the motions of the mind’. And most importantly, there is Mrs O’Poole, Father David’s housekeeper.
Hobbled by a cruel past, half-imposed, half-chosen (she gave up a child at birth to protect it from her drink-sodden husband), she is wise, ethical and bent on self-improvement, and she treasures her daily conversations with Father David. When cancer comes for her, he tries to say the right things, obtusely thinking, as she puts it, that ‘manners and conversation can get us round anything at all...’ It is not, she tells him, his ‘job to understand’, nor is it ‘to make things smaller than they are’.
Yet making things smaller than they are may be a dangerous habit of Father Anderton’s. It will cost him, even as he points to a raging desire in others to make things bigger than they are (it was just a kiss...). O’Hagan does not moralise. We are with Father Anderton more than we are against him. And yet the author makes it his subtle, humanising business to reveal David’s vanity and his capacity for self-delusion even as we may admire his depth of feeling and searing honesty about himself.
It is hard to imagine a better, more beautiful novel being published this year. I will certainly be reading it again.
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