The charge sheet against Catholicism (or perhaps one should say English Catholicism) as set out in Stephen Hough’s unsparing, sometimes shocking first novel, is long. Many of the offences are ­aesthetic. Hough (best-known as a leading concert pianist, also a composer and painter) writes brilliantly about the ghastly lack of taste, the depressing mish-mash of styles which afflict so many English Catholic churches and institutions – including Craigbourne, the ­setting for this relatively short fiction about a tormented, sex-addicted priest sent by his bishop on a retreat to find spiritual renewal.