HEADLINE: A great entertainment and page-turner……but not to
be taken seriously.
SPOILER ALERT
Reader beware! If you read further, key elements of the plot
will be revealed.
Someone rash enough to be walking the chilly streets of
Edinburgh late on a dark January evening might have been surprised to see white
smoke suddenly emerging from a chimney. What could it be? Surely not some sort
of imitation papal conclave?
Perhaps venturing nearer, the sounds of uproarious
conversation and laughter would make this seem less likely, and peering through
a chink of the curtains at the huddle of decidedly un-Cardinal-like figures and
the litter of bottles the walker would turn and go on his or her way, with the
mystery unsolved.
But they would have been closer to the truth than they
realised. For it was the Monthly Book Group in full swing, and they had just
reached a consensus, recorded above, on “Conclave”, the 2016 novel by Robert
Harris. This takes as its apparently unpromising theme of the election of a new
Pope.
Coming from a modest background, Harris read English at
Cambridge, and rose to become President of the Union and editor of “Varsity”.
He then joined the BBC to work on current affairs, moving at 30 to become political
editor of the Observer. This background in English, current affairs and
journalism may help to explain his development into a very gifted writer,
particularly of historical novels. He has an outstanding ability for gripping
story-telling combined with an ability to absorb research and produce books at
great speed.
Everyone enjoyed the book and found it a real page-turner.
But everyone had reservations of various kinds, and was disappointed when they
compared the book with “An Officer and a Spy” (discussed October 2014).
One reader suggested that Harris was less good when
freewheeling in pure fiction, and much better when constrained to follow
historical fact as in his novels about Cicero or Dreyfus. As is common in the
creative process, constraint can paradoxically liberate the imagination.
We were impressed by the volume of research into the arcane
Conclave processes that Harris had carried out, and the access he had gained in
the Vatican and elsewhere to help him do this. However, many – though not all -
felt that the book was slowed down by the need he seemed to feel to incorporate
so much research. We also wondered if C.P. Snow’s “The Masters”, about the
election of a new master at a Cambridge College, had been an influence on
Harris.
All the action happened within a Conclave shut off from the
world, creating a similar enclosed feel to an Agatha Christie detective novel,
so often set in a remote country house, or to a play with only one set. Indeed,
rather like a detective novel, it had a formulaic feel, as the reader was
sucked into the plot by wondering which candidate would win the Papacy as each
vote unfolded, and as there was a succession of twists as front-runner after
front-runner was unseated by an unsavoury revelation.
Many of the main characters, essentially the papal
candidates coming from different continents, were pretty one-dimensional, and
not far from burlesque or caricature. They were portrayed with fairly gentle
satire.
Part of the fun is that many of the candidates are absolutely
desperate to become Pope. They pursue that objective by using the dark arts of
politicians, and, in one case, the type of bribery more commonly associated
with FIFA. Our discussion coincided with the newspaper report of a
psychological study that showed that those rising to the top of large
organisations tended to have psychopathic (distinctly unchristian!) character
traits.
But at the same time we are allowed inside the mind of
Cardinal Lomeli, the Pope’s Dean and chief administrator who is running the
Conclave. We observe much of the action through Lomeli’s stream of
consciousness.
Lomeli is a well-drawn character, suffering from a crisis of
faith yet still religious, determined to do the right thing, without personal
ambition, and believing that God may want him to play a role in finding the
right Pope. There is a fine passage in which Lomeli goes past the painting of
the Last Judgement feeling like one of the damned himself – this is the sort of
thing that lifts Harris above run of the mill thriller writers. And Lomeli is
also allowed a line in ironic wit:
“Once God explained all mysteries. Now He has been
usurped by conspiracy theorists. They are the heretics of the age...”
“who had the advantage of seeming to be American without
the disadvantage of actually being one...”
“In the United Kingdom – that godless isle of apostasy,
where the whole affair was being treated as a horse race – the Ladbrokes
betting agency made Cardinal Adeyemi the new favourite...”
“an excess of simplicity, after all, was just another
form of ostentation, and pride in one’s humility a sin...”
The Book Group comprises a wide range of attitudes to
religion – from practising Christians to those who view religion as a system of
control that delivers riches and power for those at the top.
The practising Christians noted that there little of
substance about the role of prayer in such a Conclave. Admittedly Lomeli had
the religious consciousness and often resorted to prayer, but the content of
his prayers was not shown. They were fairly confident Harris was an atheist,
despite the subtle portrait of Lomeli.
A Catholic made the telling point that most recent Popes had
been reluctant to take up the office, a world away from the author’s assumption
that Cardinals behaved like Westminster politicians. Despite these
disappointments they, like the rest, found the book a great page-turner of a
political thriller. However, the book was really about politics, not religion.
On the other side,
“The Vatican Map Room” thundered
one of our atheists, “is more like a War Room than a Map Room”.
There followed an interesting, if un-illuminating, debate
about the religious beliefs of Harris. Most but not all thought him an atheist,
who went to considerable efforts to disguise this through creating the internal
life of Lomeli, and was anxious not to offend the Church too much.
In the end, we resorted to the sacrilegious device of Google
to scrutinise his beliefs, and found this comment he made in an interview with
the Catholic Herald “I don’t think this book could have been written by a
complete atheist”. So…not an atheist……..or
rather not a complete atheist……or…… good at political replies?
The Catholic Herald gives Harris a good review: “More
than an intelligent thriller: it reveals the dilemmas we all face…. Its author
clearly has engaged with the Church.” By
contrast the Irish Times finds “only black smoke blowing through the
literary chimney.”
The final “twist” of the book – a word usually used for
detective stories – comes when the well-deserved winner of the contest is
suggested to be genetically female, but inter-sexual. This was too much for us. This was not so much gentle satire
as farce. Harris had already gently chided the church for its sexism by his
portrayal of the undervalued Nuns, but here was a crashing of the gears and a
full frontal attack.
Our experts were soon on the case, however, with our medical
adviser judging that it was indeed possible that the true gender of the new
Pope had been missed in [her] upbringing in the Philippines.
And our historical adviser pointed out that this plot
element was not as strange as it seemed, given that, at least according to
protestant mythology, Pope Ioannes Anglicus (855-857) was a woman disguised as
a man (“Pope Joan”). For many centuries thereafter a pierced chair (“sedia
stercoraria”) was used to check that a newly elected Pope was indeed male prior
to confirming his appointment.
Suitably aghast we wandered around some of the details of
the book – such as being pleasantly surprised about the lack of smart phones
being brought into the Conclave (although later research shows that the Pope
does have a Facebook page!) - before returning to agree a conclusion.
The white smoke was made ready as we agreed that this was a
great entertainment and page-turner, but not a great book. On closer
examination not so much an inter-sexual Pope as an inter-genre novel emerged,
with elements of political thriller, serious stream of consciousness character
portrayal, caricature, detective story and high farce welded, somewhat
uneasily, together.
It did not do to look too closely. As one member observed: “I
thoroughly enjoyed it as a page-turner. But
I was left with the feeling of having eaten a fast-food takeaway, not a
substantial meal!”
