O’Hagan’s accomplished prose and casual wit counterbalance his abstraction, aided by fine character portraits, especially...
An impeccably crafted, philosophically framed account of the decline and disgrace of an impressionable Catholic priest.
U.K. author O’Hagan (Personality, 2003, etc.) turns to questions of insight in a beautiful but ruined 21st-century landscape. The protagonist, father David Anderton, is a 56-year-old, half-English, half-Scottish intellectual and aesthete whose tastes for Chopin, Proust and French cuisine sit uneasily with his Scottish parishioners, a wasteland of alcoholic men and dehumanized youth. Anderton, whose claim to have tasted the fullness of life rests on a gay relationship with a political firebrand during the 1960s, has a weakness for stronger personalities, and now falls in with a charismatic teenage trouble-maker, 15-year-old Mark McNulty, who leads the priest into tolerating, then sampling, drugs, and eventually to a stolen kiss. Arrest and criminal charges of sexual abuse follow, forcing Anderton to review his life in the church—“a beautiful hiding place” of increasing appeal after his lover’s early death. O’Hagan deftly juxtaposes absurdly precious scenes of Oxford elitism with a harsh vision of the Scottish provinces, where the working class, now all but irrelevant, has sunk into an existence shaped by booze, mass culture, tribalism and media-fuelled prejudice, as evidenced by the modern witch-hunt that ensues. After Anderton’s trial and conviction comes a coda in which the death, from cancer, of his housekeeper—who doubled as his conscience—opens up an assessment of the nature of love and individual integrity.
O’Hagan’s accomplished prose and casual wit counterbalance his abstraction, aided by fine character portraits, especially that of an intellectually acute but isolated soul condemned by his own fallibility.Pub Date: June 4, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-101303-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
This first novel, ostensibly about the friendship between two boys, Reuven and Danny, from the time when they are fourteen on opposing yeshiva ball clubs, is actually a gently didactic differentiation between two aspects of the Jewish faith, the Hasidic and the Orthodox. Primarily the Hasidic, the little known mystics with their beards, earlocks and stringently reclusive way of life. According to Reuven's father who is a Zionist, an activist, they are fanatics; according to Danny's, other Jews are apostates and Zionists "goyim." The schisms here are reflected through discussions, between fathers and sons, and through the separation imposed on the two boys for two years which still does not affect their lasting friendship or enduring hopes: Danny goes on to become a psychiatrist refusing his inherited position of "tzaddik"; Reuven a rabbi.... The explanation, in fact exegesis, of Jewish culture and learning, of the special dedication of the Hasidic with its emphasis on mind and soul, is done in sufficiently facile form to engage one's interest and sentiment. The publishers however see a much wider audience for The Chosen. If they "rub their tzitzis for good luck,"—perhaps—although we doubt it.
Pub Date: April 28, 1967
ISBN: 0449911543
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1967
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