The most striking thing about Piers Paul Read’s early novels was their characters’ susceptibility to physical decay. The bloom of youth barely had time to settle before it was overrun by maggots. Thus, coolly appraising his mistress’s somewhat faded charms, Hilary Fletcher in The Upstart (1973) notes that marriage and children ‘had loosened her bones and skin and clouded those once fresh eyes with the film of age.’ Harriet, it turns out, is all of 26. Strickland, the barrister hero of A Married Man (1979) has an even worse time of it, what with the smell of his wife’s wind and ‘the liverish early morning odour from her mouth’. Clare, alas, is a long over-the-hill 32.
Read’s insistence on the inexorability of human decline was a necessary preamble to his single great theme. This was not simply the vanity of human wishes, but the working out of divine providence. For The Upstart and A Married Man were Catholic novels, as astringent and remorseless in their way as anything by such previous exponents of the form as Evelyn Waugh and R. H. Benson. The human activity that went on in them, you inferred, had very little significance when set against the much more serious destinies that lurked around the corner. Fletcher, waiting to have tea with his wife and children, while reflecting on his inevitable death, believes that ‘between these two appointments there is nothing of importance’.
All this — Fletcher’s quietism, the average human existence seen as a kind of tedious sideshow — gestures at the great dilemma of the Catholic novel: a dilemma rendered all the more acute by the fact that most of its practitioners would deny that it even exists. To Read, the paradox of his work — a scrupulous realism suddenly undercut by irradiations of divine grace — is not a paradox, it is merely evidence of God working his purpose out. The Upstart, for example, grinds to a halt when Fletcher, a vengeful vicar’s son who has systematically ruined the lives of the aristocratic family in the great house next door, wanders into a prison confessional and repents. No point in the non-believer complaining that the scene is psychologically flawed, that nothing in Fletcher’s history gives it plausibility. God works in mysterious ways, you see, and the literary critic can only nod his head.
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