Joy to the world

Patrick Gale’s new novel could be read as a companion work to his hugely successful Notes from an Exhibition, and in fact, in a satisfying twist, some characters and even objects slip from the latter into this novel. Notes from an Exhibition centred around the character of Rachel Kelly, whose mental instability and solipsistic devotion to her art left a painful mark on her family. The ‘perfectly good man’ of this title is a vicar, Barnaby Johnson, as kind, gentle and balanced as Rachel Kelly was not, yet with the same sense of vocation — in this case, selfless service to the church — that moulds and in its own way scars his family. ‘Ah,’ says his daughter Carrie to another child of a ‘very good man’, ‘you have my deepest sympathy.’

Johnson, known as Father Barnaby to his Cornish congregation, is a wonderful vicar, the sort of transparently virtuous person who inspires others with love and wonder. Serious, vulnerable and touching, he radiates ‘an innocent certainty. This was belief, that compelled one to fall in with it and follow because to do otherwise would be a kind of cruelty.’ Yet with his usual effortless ventriloquism, Gale lays bare the souls of the people surrounding Father Barnaby — his wife, daughter and son — who struggle with the constant feeling that they are sharing him, and not just with his parishioners. In one memorable phrase, it seems as though he is carrying on ‘an important conversation with someone else in the room’.

The troubles of a Church of England minister and his family are an unfashionable subject, and I can’t help liking Gale for choosing it. Nonetheless I found myself on occasion waiting for Father Barnaby to fall from grace, ‘itching to find a fault in him, even a small one’, as the sinister Modest Carlsson does.