The Breath of Night, by Michael Arditti

There is always meat in Michael Arditti’s novels. He is a writer who presents moral problems via fiction but is subtle and shrewd enough to know that ‘issue books’, which are tracts not works of the imagination, are dull to read and rarely work as fiction should. He presents us with characters who are fully rounded, credible human beings living through moral dilemmas, affected by them, caring about them, living and dying within their context. In other words, he is an intelligent novelist.

But he is also a good storyteller, so this new novel is both stirring and exciting to read, and has a setting which is not ‘background’ but far more: a principal character in the book — in the sense that Thomas Hardy’s landscapes are characters, and shape the lives, thoughts, morals, emotions, beliefs and, as in the case of Arditti’s Philippines, even physique of the people who are born, reared and live within them.

Julian Tremayne was ordained as a Jesuit priest in the 1970s and sent out to the Philippines, where he gradually shed his political innocence and became aware of the plight of the poor and the corruption of the rich and the governing classes, as so many priests in that part of the world have done. But other priests, especially those in positions of authority, are less political, some would say less naive, and more devoted to Church than to God. One even utters the breathtaking but entirely credible phrase, ‘The gospel is nothing without the church.’

Some years later, a young man called Philip Sawyer becomes engaged to Father Julian’s great niece. By then the priest has apparently been killed and there is a campaign, gaining momentum and some official support, to have him canonised.