A question of judgment

A Whispered Name, by William Brodrick

This is the third of William Brodrick’s sensitively wrought novels featuring his contemplative monk, Anselm, an attractive and credible Every- man who has occasionally to leave his monastery to investigate ambiguous problems of evil, forgiveness and, in this case, sacrifice.

Brodrick’s hero is aptly named since Saint Anselm, an 11th-12th century Archbishop of Canterbury, was a renowned scholastic who defended the faith by intellectual argument rather than by reference to scripture and other authorities. Broderick’s Anselm does much the same in his contemporary investigations, guided by moral reasoning and intuition rather than dogma. He is helped by the fact that, before becoming a monk, he was a barrister (his creator did it the other way round).

In this novel the death of Herbert Moore, an ancient revered monk, provokes his fellows to seek to reconcile half-known elements of his past. That is a path that leads back to the first world war and Herbert’s service on a court martial that condemned a deserter to death. As he has demonstrated before and does again here, Brodrick is good on the past, not only in evoking its hidden depths and beguiling shallows, its moral and psychological resonances, but in his economical evocations of place and circumstance. It must have been tempting, given the literary enthusiasm for first world war blood and gore, to take the easy option and luxuriate in the horror, but Brodrick’s observations do enough to convey it without dwelling on it: ‘Herbert slid through a sludge of intestines and grit, hauling himself into the open. Staring across the beaten land, he tried to gain his bearings.’ Some are as unexpected as they are persuasive: ‘The bellows of the observation balloons flashed with sallow light from the inferno on the ground.’