"Be near me" by Andrew O'Hagan

An audio book. In chapter 1 it's the 1970s, In Edinburgh David meets up with his mother. Oxford, Rome and Conor are behind him. He's going to be a priest in Blackpool.

After this glimpse of his mother (a novelist, Scottish), we move ahead in time, learn about his dead father (a surgeon, English), his housekeeper Mrs Pool (42, a bit snobby with an alcoholic husband). He's 56 now, a priest at a little Scottish town. He helps at a Catholic comprehensive, befriends kids Mark and Lisa, has long talks with them, meeting them late at night, arranges school trips. They tell him about their lives. He thinks Mark is pretty. Lisa tells him he's wasted his life. There are long passages of dialogue. Memories are more like flashbacks - detailed.

Emerging themes are England/Scotland, Role/Self, Poor/Working, Protestant/Catholic. In a short passage we learn that his housekeeper has cancer, and that she gave her only baby to her sister because she didn't trust her husband.

Thought if not language becomes elevated when David thinks - "he enjoyed the spectacle of his life in this town, the constant drama of his dislikes, his role as a man coming down hard on strangers and phoniness, all the while I suspect more strange and more phony to himself than he ever thought possible. Such men have pride in their roles yet they also hate the way things have gone, forever conjuring former worlds"

Discussions (and David's choices) often lead to situations where people are on the same side as their enemies against a greater evil. Socialists find themselves on the same side as US republicans in foreign affairs. Feminists and anti-Islams have the same enemies.

The extended passages of real-time dialogue don't earn their keep. The college banter's tedious (he and his friends - the Marcelists - used to quiz each other about Proust's novels). And I never saw why Mark would bother hanging about with David. David commmits an indescretion - just a kiss - while under the influence of drugs and music. He's quiet about his homosexuality (which suits him, but in those days it was a legal requirement too). His gayness doesn't seem to have troubled him - perhaps public school, his non-standard mother, and Oxford made it easy for him.

Soon after, in his room "I found a dead butterfly covered in dust." He recalls butterflies from his Balliol days, the caterpillars their. He thinks back to Conor "as I placed the dry butterfly in the fire and saw it consumed into nothingness, the energy going out from that tiny body now glowing white hot in a cradle of burning coals". Conor was his boyfriend at Oxford. He died in a car crash while still a student.

Suddenly after the kiss David's branded as a molester - put on trial, attacked, house set alight, etc. Quite how this happened isn't clear, and the intensity of the reaction is surprising. Maybe when Mark went home his troubled father was angry with him, and Mark blamed David.

We're not told how he slid into religion (maybe Conor's death was the last straw). He can easily withdraw from life into reflection and aesthetics. In times of stress he's likely to become absorbed in some detail or other. His reaction to the charge is other-worldly. His withdrawn personality had made the community suspicious.

He's found guilty and has to do community service. He meets Mark by chance in a shop and they have a friendly albeit awkward chat. The book ends with David's visit to Mr Pool, now a widower. They have both learnt from her.

Too slow.

Other reviews

• Hilary Mantel (He is a writer of stern and bleak ambition, but with a tender concern for the people who find themselves adrift and inadequate - for their particularity, for the singularity of their broken stories. As often with this writer, digressions can seem to slow the narrative and divert it; a bit too much of those Proustians, perhaps, a bit too much dinner-table argument over political commonplaces.)
• Stephen Metcalf (That people might be made whole by what they are denied — a paradox to start with, it runs wholly counter to the logic of the times. But what else describes a sacred man’s job? His renunciations can’t be ours, but they can cast our own worldliness in an importantly compromised light. We are brought, by O’Hagan’s patient expositions, to feel two utterly contrary things: that Anderton has failed grotesquely in ceding his adult and priestly authority to two heedless children; and that he needed to fall in love with Mark, not because Mark is importantly like Conor (he isn’t, remotely) but because Mark represents the opposite of everything that has reconciled Anderton to his grief.)
• Kirkus reviews (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.)
• Goodreads