Book Review

Fiction’s sacramental insights

Aiming at Heaven, Getting the Earth: the English Catholic novel today

In Graham Greene's The End of the Affair (1951), the third of what are often called his "Catholic novels", the convinced atheism of the sour and angry narrator, Maurice Bendrix, is needled by a series of surprises and revelations, culminating in a relatively minor, but nonetheless unambiguous, piece of heavy divine arm-twisting. A strawberry birthmark that has disfigured a handsome face is made suddenly to vanish. When the publication of a collected edition of his works many years later gave Greene a chance to titivate the text, he decided to smoothe out the miracle. The sudden disappearance of the strawberry mark is replaced by the blurry cure of an indeterminate skin disorder. Is God at work here? Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on your angle of vision, on how you "see" the world.

Does the idea of a "Catholic novel" still mean anything? Or at least, does it mean anything more than describing This Sporting Life as a "Rugby League novel" or Watership Down as "a rabbit novel"? And, if there is a tradition of Catholic novel-writing, has it run out of steam? The American novelist Walker Percy has likened the Catholic writer to "a man who has found a treasure hidden in the attic of an old house, but he is writing for people who have moved out to the suburbs and who are bloody sick of the old house and everything in it". Marian Crowe quotes David Lodge's analysis: "I don't think that one can talk of the Catholic novel in quite such sharply defined terms any more, partly because Catholicism itself has become a much more confused - and confusing - faith, more difficult to define ... The Church no longer presents that sort of monolithic, unified, uniform view of life which it once did."

If you were to read one after another the dozen modern novels that Crowe discusses in Aiming at Heaven, Getting the Earth you could be forgiven for thinking that what's really going on with the Catholic novel is that there are several very different religions all parading under the banner of "Catholicism".

Crowe, a visiting scholar at the University of Notre Dame, approaches the Catholic novel with the unpretentious voice of the keenest and most fluent member of a reading club. She insists that the Catholic novel is alive and kicking. She charts its development from its origins in France, through the work of François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos and then on to the supremos of "the golden age" of the Catholic novel in England, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh.

The meat of her book is an enthusiastic survey of 12 novels, three each by Alice Thomas Ellis, Sara Maitland, David Lodge and Piers Paul Read. Although her own taste is for the bluff and sturdy Catholicism of Ellis and Read, in which miracles happen and unrepentant sinners go to hell, she takes a relaxed approach to Sara Maitland's feminist jabs and David Lodge's cheerful heresies.

In their different ways she recognises that all four writers are contributing to the persistent vitality of the Catholic novel. Although clearly very fond of Alice Thomas Ellis, a stickler for the Old Religion, I'd guess Crowe's favourite is Piers Paul Read, the writer who best evokes the high drama of the battle for the soul in the style of a Catholic writer of the Fifties. Sin is attractive, glamorous - and it will kill you. His plots often have a grand historical sweep, the ideas are big and bold, and the sex is always good, even when it is "bad'. But Crowe loves all four of these writers, and wants you to enjoy and appreciate their books as much as she does.

Greene's tampering with his text highlights the change in the weather that has settled over Catholicism since the publication of the original edition of The End of the Affair in 1951. In the golden age, as well as vanishing birthmarks, the stakes seemed to be higher, there was more torment, more agonising over sex (do young Catholics even trouble to ask "How far can you go?" any more?), better costumes. There has been a change of tack from doling out detailed instructions about actions and dispositions to be avoided to a fuzzier concern with what tends to human flourishing. The stick has been put away, and the carrot has been garnished and glazed.

From the storyteller's point of view, a good deal of dramatic potential has been sacrificed. Every Catholic novelist takes the view that God is present in the world. But what does God actually do? Stories that forcefully suggest that every now and again God can't resist rolling up his sleeves and getting directly involved in human affairs have been increasingly replaced by stories that rely on the "eyes of faith" to notice the presence of grace. The supernatural is not to be found in some parallel order that occasionally pokes its nose into the natural one. Strawberry birthmarks no longer vanish. Miracles don't happen. And hell no longer exists, or at least, people like us no longer have to worry about being sent there.

John Updike, who might be loosely described as a Lutheran, is the master of simply looking at the world and describing everything in it with a merciless wide-eyed attentiveness. "Description expresses love," he writes. "Only truth, however harsh, is holy." I confess I find Updike's work enthralling, and want to cheer whenever I read it. Ian McEwan's patient, painterly style is not dissimilar to Updike's. He notices everything. But while Updike goes to church on Sunday, McEwan is vociferous in his distaste for religion. What is the sliver of insight that separates Updike from McEwan? If the Catholic novel is only a matter of paying more serious attention to the ordinary, then, as Crowe puts it with her brisk common sense, "One wonders how many readers would get the point." Updike doesn't rate a mention in the book.

The emergence of the Catholic novel in France after the First World War was sparked by the creative tension between the Church and secular anticlericalism, and something not dissimilar may be happening in Europe now. Boneheaded, scary, sleazy, whatever - religion is in trouble again, and that may already be provoking a revival of the Catholic novel.

Yet Catholic writers have nothing new to tell us. They can only play on variations on the same old saws - love and justice, hope and forgiveness - and the same old paradoxes - through tears, we find joy; in weakness, we discover strength; in giving up our seat, we find ourselves in a place of honour.

But though there may be no new tricks, the old ones are pretty good, and the art of the skilful conjurer is to make the audience gasp with astonishment, imagining that they have never seen or heard such things before. In the past year or so I've read three terrific novels all making thoughtful and provocative use of Catholic themes and material without a hint of the churchy or the parsonical: Be Near Me by Andrew O'Hagan, Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Havoc In Its Third Year by Ronan Bennett. Theologians and prefects of sacred congregations have rather lost the ability to dazzle us, but novelists are still pulling it off.

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