Sacred Hearts

Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunnant

At 16, Serafina enters the Ferrara convent of Santa Caterina as its prisoner, screaming like a madwoman. She’s one of a nobleman’s two daughters, but there is only dowry enough for one suitable marriage. In a time of political and religious ferment her dowry to the convent makes her especially desirable, but she is moreover possessed of a heavenly voice that will add to the lustre of their famous choir. In time, Serafina will, like the rest, accept that convent life is preferable to the brutality of the world outside, and turn to the ideal bridegroom, Christ. What they do not know is that she is already passionately in love.In Sacred Hearts, Sarah Dunant’s third historical novel set in Renaissance Italy, Serafina, stroppy and silent, seems reminiscent of many modern teenage girls, but finds it harder not to form a relationship with the humane, scholarly herbalist Suora Zuana, whose pupil she becomes. By telling her story through the eyes of two heroines, a resonant narrative tension between youth and age, science and superstition, love and chastity is set up. The convent’s all-female world is deformed physically in many cases, but also morally and intellectually. Yet it contains goodness and compassion. Threatened from without, the worldly Abbess also has an enemy within in Suora Umiliana, a fanatic who believes that the ancient Suora Magdalena’s stigmata are a sign of insufficient piety. Inevitably, when describing a life of privation and routine, there are some longueurs. We learn a good deal more about Zuana, her opinions of sex and her memories of her dead father, than the fiery young teenager who is central to the plot. There are stomach-churning descriptions of foul breath, bodily ills, starvation and putrefaction. Serafina’s attempts to contact her lover outside the impassably sheer convent walls seem unrewarded until, 150 pages in, the moment that will have Hollywood panting after the film rights. Gathered together to sing invisibly for the city behind a grille, the choir’s “best songbird” opens her mouth – only to be effortlessly outclassed by Serafina’s voice, soaring unexpectedly above it. She knows that her lover is in the congregation; but the convent believes their novice has opened her heart to Christ. Then, we’re never in doubt that Serafina is going to try to escape. It’s a battle of wits, feminine duplicity and politics of a kind that readers adore, and whereas Dunant’s previous historical novels were energetically sexual, this more limited palette is, rewardingly, about two expressions of love. There are the usual hysterical fits, visions, fainting and incarcerations we expect from what is virtually a subgenre, and also the comical details that delight: the posh, indoor nuns whose relations smuggle in silver trays to act as mirrors to aid in the removal of facial hair. Yet what you remember most is the painful maternal passion the nuns pour on small dogs – and the intellectual ability directed into musical composition and a culture which, in 1570, is doomed to be repressed by the Council of Trent. Historical fiction is no longer considered middlebrow – rightly if you remember War and Peace, A Tale of Two Cities or Possession; wrongly if you consider Jean Plaidy, Anya Seton and numerous modish pasticheurs. Sacred Heartscould be dismissed as a feminist romp about a nun on the run. Yet the power of Dunant’s imagination, the vigour of her scholarship and the lucidity of her style make this a novel that, in addressing unfashionable questions about the price of religious faith, is as intelligent as it is enjoyable.

Lolita

Last night we watched the film 'Lolita'.

Lolita is a 1997 drama film directed by Adrian Lyne and stars Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert and Dominique Swain as Dolores "Lolita" Haze, with supporting roles by Melanie Griffith as Charlotte Haze, and Frank Langella as Clare Quilty. It is the second screen adaptation of the novel of the same name by Vladimir Nabokov. The film concerns the story of an English professor's obsession with his landlady's flirtatious daughter and his attempts to possess her. Lolita was originally filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, when much of the novel’s content was toned down significantly due to censorship restrictions. In a less conservative era, British director Lyne began filming his own adaptation.

With the central theme of Humbert's hebephilia, the film had considerable difficulty finding an American distributor^[ and premiered in Europe before being released in America, where it was met with much controversy. The film was picked up in the United States by Showtime, a cablenetwork, before finally being released theatrically by The Samuel Goldwyn Company. The performances by Irons and Swain impressed audiences, but, although praised by some critics for its faithfulness to Nabokov's narrative, the film received a mixed critical reception in theUnited States. Following its theatrical release, the film was distributed on VHS and DVD byPathé, both of which are now out-of-print.

Plot summary

In 1947, Humbert Humbert, a European professor of French literature, travels to New Hampshirein the United States to take a teaching position. He rents a room in the home of widow Charlotte Haze, largely because he sees her adolescent daughter, Dolores (variously called "Dolly" or "Lo"; age 12 in Nabokov's novel, but shown as slightly older in the film), while touring the house. Obsessed from boyhood with girls of this age (whom he calls "nymphets"), partly because of an early sexual experience and tragic loss, Humbert marries Charlotte for the sake of access to her daughter.

Charlotte's untimely death, shortly after she discovers his preference for her daughter, frees Humbert to pursue a sexual and emotional relationship with Dolores, whom he nicknames "Lolita". The two travel the country for a few weeks or months, staying in various motels but eventually settling in a college town where Humbert takes a teaching job. However, Lolita's increasing boredom with Humbert, as well as her growing desire for independence, fuels a constant tension between them. Humbert's desperate affections for Lo are also rivaled by another man, the playwright Clare Quilty, who has been pursuing Lo from the beginning. Quilty's name and identity are at first unknown to Humbert, and when Lolita runs away to him, Humbert's search for her is unsuccessful.

Three years later, after a receiving a letter asking for financial help, Humbert visits the now 17-year-old Lolita, married to another man and pregnant. Humbert, who still loves her, asks her to run away with him, but she refuses. He relents and gives her a substantial amount of money and information about her inheritance from her mother. He also discovers the name of his nemesis, Quilty, whom he hunts down and murders.

After being arrested, Humbert dies in prison in November 1950. Lolita dies in childbirth a month later, on Christmas Day.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (Russian: Влади́мир Влади́мирович Набо́ков,pronounced [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr nɐˈbokəf]; 22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1899^c – 2 July 1977) was a multilingualRussian-American novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist. He also made contributions to entomology and had an interest in chess problems.

Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as among his most important novels and is his most widely known, exhibiting the love of intricate word play and synesthetic detail that characterised all his works. The novel was ranked at #4 in the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels.Pale Fire (1962) was ranked at #53 on the same list. His memoir entitled Speak, Memory was listed #8 on the Modern Library nonfiction list.

Nabokov's afterword

In 1956, Nabokov penned an afterword to Lolita ("On a Book Entitled Lolita") that was included in every subsequent edition of the book.

One of the first things Nabokov makes a point of saying is, despite John Ray Jr.'s claim in the Foreword, there is no moral to the story.

In the afterword, Nabokov wrote that "the initial shiver of inspiration" for Lolita "was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage". Neither the article nor the drawing has been recovered.

In response to an American critic who characterized Lolita as the record of Nabokov's "love affair with the romantic novel", Nabokov wrote that "the substitution of 'English language' for 'romantic novel' would make this elegant formula more correct".

Nabokov concluded the afterword with a reference to his beloved first language, which he abandoned as a writer once he moved to the United States in 1940: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian language for a second-rate brand of English".

Another 50th

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee!

This heart-wrenching, coming-of-age tale set in a South poisoned by

virulent prejudice, has been translated into more than forty languages,

sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, served as the basis of

an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best

novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. It was instantly successful and has become a classic of modern American literature. The plot and characters are loosely based on the author's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as on an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old.

The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality. The narrator's father, Atticus Finch, has served as a moral hero for many readers and as a model of integrity for lawyers. One critic explained the novel's impact by writing, "In the twentieth century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its protagonist, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism."

As a Southern Gothic novel and a Bildungsroman, the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbirdinvolve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence. Scholars have noted that Lee also addresses issues of class, courage and compassion, and gender roles in the American Deep South. The book is widely taught in schools in English-speaking countries with lessons that emphasize tolerance and decry prejudice. Despite its themes, To Kill a Mockingbird has been subject to campaigns for removal from public classrooms. Often the book is challenged for its use of racial epithets, and writers have noticed that regardless of its popularity since its publication, some readers are displeased by the novel's treatment of black characters.

Lee's novel was initially reviewed by at least 30 newspapers and magazines, whose critics varied widely in their assessments. More recently, British librarians ranked the book ahead of the Bible as one "every adult should read before they die". The book was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 1962 by director Robert Mulligan, with a screenplay by Horton Foote. Since 1990, a play based on the novel has been performed annually in Harper Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. To date, it is Lee's only published novel, and although she continues to respond to the book's impact, she has refused any personal publicity for herself or the novel since 1964.

Lee used the mockingbird to symbolize innocence in the novel.

Sacred Hearts

Ruth brought me this to read when she visited recently. It is an interesting read following my recent stay with contemporary sisters at their Birmingham convent.

SACRED HEARTS by Sarah Dunant

1570 in the Italian city of Ferrara, and the convent of Santa Caterina is filled with noble women who are married to Christ because they cannot find husbands on the outside. Enter 16 year old Serafina, howling with rage and hormones and determined to escape. Her arrival disrupts the harmony and stability of the convent, as overseen by Madonna Chiara, an abbess as fluent in politics as she is in prayer. She assigns the novice into the care of Suora Zuana, the scholarly nun who runs the dispensary and treats all manner of sickness, from pestilence and melancholy to self-inflicted wounds. As an unlikely relationship builds between the two women, others figures stand watching and waiting; most notably theå novice mistress, Suora Umiliana, a crusader for God and ever stricter piety and the mysterious, decrepit Suora Magdalena, incarcerated in her cell with a history of ecstasy and visions.

Walled in

A masterfully created tale of convent life in 16th-century Italy has Donna Leon captivated (Donna Leon in Guardian)

Reading Sarah Dunant's latest novel, set in the Italian Renaissance, one is forced to wonder whether Orwell might have had cloistered life in mind when he created the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Sacred Hearts takes place inside the Benedictine cloister of Santa Caterina, in 16th-century Ferrara, among women who have internalised the law that all must be done "for the good of the convent". This is a world in which "the very purpose of convent life is to iron out the sense of the individual", and the abbess believes it is proper "to hate one's own will".

Thus the cards are stacked against the strong-willed new novice, Serafina, who finds herself, at 16, enclosed within the walls of the convent, where there are "no rutting, drunken husbands poking at tired or pious wives". Serafina, who leaves behind the man she loves, realises there will also be no husband, no passion, and no children. She brings as part of her dowry an extraordinary vocal talent, which will be put to use in divine worship and during the less frequent occasions when the convent fishes for gifts and donations by entertaining its richest patrons with vocal and theatrical spectacles.

Serafina is there against her will, and it is this will that must be stamped out until she is brought to acceptance of the fact that "He loves me". She is befriended by Suora Zuana, the intelligent and compassionate nun in charge of the infirmary, herself once an unwilling novice; and opposed by Suora Chiara, the wilful and clever abbess, an adroit strategist who is attempting to preserve the convent's faintly permissive autonomy in the midst of the reformist tempest launched by the Council of Trent.

Dunant convincingly presents Serafina's body and will as the field upon which this larger battle will be fought. Through the twists and turns of events, the reader is never allowed to forget the importance of this one girl's destiny, nor is the sense of suspense ever allowed to slacken. Will she escape back into a world where pleasure is not viewed as a sin?

Though a modern reader will see how easily something like the stigmata in the novel might be faked, it never occurs to Suora Zuana to think about just how creepy it is, nor to question the basis of her essentially misogynist world. Suora Zuana's description of fasting reads like a modern treatise on anorexia, yet she remains true to her times by seeing it as a manifestation, however excessive, of religious rigour. It is also made abundantly clear that this world, limiting and confining as it is, presents the women in it with the chance of freedom from the restraints of the wider society.

Dunant endows her characters with a humanity that captures the concern, not just the interest, of the reader. They want and suffer, laugh and cry, just as we do and mostly for the same reasons. Yet they remain women of their own time, endowed with their peculiar sympathies and prejudices. Sacred Hearts masterfully creates a world and that smaller place within it which attempts to offer sanctuary, rather than mere imprisonment, to the women inside its walls.

Atonement

(MY LATEST READING)

Atonement is a 2001 novel by British author Ian McEwan.

The title refers to the process of forgiving or pardoning a transgression, and alludes to the main characters search for atonement. An upper-middle-class girl in interwar England - who aspires to be a writer - makes a serious mistake that has life changing affects for many. Consequently through the remaining years of the century she seeks atonement - which leads to an exploration on the nature of writing itself.

It is widely regarded as one of McEwan's best works and is one of the most celebrated and honoured books of recent years. It was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize for fiction, an award he had already won for his previous novel, Amsterdam. McEwan utilises several stylistic techniques in the novel, including metafiction and psychological realism. The book was later adapted into a BAFTA and Academy-Award nominated film of the same name, starring James McAvoy and Keira Knightley, and directed by Joe Wright in 2007.

The Tallis Estate is in the Surrey Hills in England, being the family home and also the site of the Tallis family party for Briony's 77th birthday. It is at The Tallis Estate that the key moments of the exposition of the story take place. The first part of the book completely takes place on this estate. In the final scene it has become a hotel; the family reunion for Briony's 77th birthday, with more than 50 guests, including various grandchildren and great-grandchildren, takes place in the same library where Robbie and Cecilia consummated their love for the first and only time.

The second section of the book contains detailed descriptions of the Dunkirk evacuation, in which Robbie takes part, and gives an account of his war experiences.

Themes

• Atonement

The novel bears the name of its primary theme. Throughout the work, the reader can see the characters search for atonement. "I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me," Briony says at the end of the novel. Briony recognizes her sin (i.e., wrongfully accusing Robbie and ruining his and Cecilia's chance at a life together) and attempts to atone for it through writing her novel. She does not grant herself forgiveness; rather, she attempts to earn atonement through giving Robbie and Cecilia a life together in her writing.

• Book/Author Relationship

McEwan reiterates the comparison between himself, a writer in reality, and Briony, a writer of fiction in his story. Throughout the novel, McEwan compares himself, an author of literary fiction, to Briony and both her literary fiction and real-life fiction. This comparison draws a relationship between the life of the author and the life of Briony in the story.

• Truth v. Imagination

Throughout the novel, Briony constructs her own world due to immaturity and misunderstanding, both in her literature and in her mind. Briony’s fabricated reality is often positive and optimistic, such as the inclusion of Robbie and Cecilia meeting at the end of her story; however her false reality initiated the plot of the story, as she lied about the rape of Lola.

• Peace

The motif of peace is shown through the stillness and calm the characters experience at the Tallis Estate at the beginning of the novel. The estate is portrayed as being an isolated and calm environment in a world of chaos and confusion, most characters seem to enjoy being separated from the chaos of society. However, Cecilia states her discontentment with the solitary and calm atmosphere at the estate, as she wants to move on to more exciting and worthwhile things in her life.

• Death

Throughout the second half of the novel, the motif of death contrasts the motif of life shown in the beginning of the novel. The motif of death occurs mostly while Briony is working in the hospital, as she encounters the death of many soldiers and bystanders from the war. Death is also portrayed during the war, when Robbie is participating in the retreat. Robbie witnesses the death of many soldiers and innocent bystanders, and many bystanders experience the death of others around themselves.

• Love

The relationship between Cecilia and Robbie is portrayed throughout the book as a loving one, even when Briony fictitiously portrays their reunion. Companionship is also exemplified between family members in the book, although Briony’s relationships are mostly overprotective.

A Christmas Carol

Cynthia and friend braved the elements to get to the final performance at the SJT today and were handed a humbug each on leaving the theatre:

30 November - 9 January

The Stephen Joseph Theatre Company in

A Christmas Carol

By Charles Dickens
Adapted and directed by Chris Monks

'Bah! Humbug!'

Ebenezer Scrooge cares for nothing and nobody. His only love is money. Then, one Christmas Eve, Scrooge is visited by three ghostly spirits, and he begins a life changing journey of redemption.

Our specially adapted version of this classic and much-loved story will feature sixteen young performers drawn from across the Borough of Scarborough, working alongside a professional cast.

Dickens spent time in Malton, and based Scrooge's Counting House on a friend's offices in Chancery Lane. What if Scrooge grew up in Ryedale? Was the penny-pinching old miser a Yorkshire man after all?

On Chesil Beach

On Chesil Beach
by Ian McEwan
Cape £12.99, pp242

THERE IS no epigraph to this short, elegantly realised novel, but if there were it would surely be the celebrated opening couple of stanzas from Philip Larkin's 'Annus Mirabilis':

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(which was rather late for me) -

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been

A sort of bargaining,

A wrangle for the ring,

A shame that started at sixteen

And spread to everything.

Ian McEwan's story exists exactly in that hinterland in British courtship between repression and licence, the Lawrence litigation and 'Love Me Do'. It is July of 1962 and Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, he an ardent graduate historian, she the tremulous lead violinist in a string quartet with aspirations to Wigmore Hall, both 22, have just got married in Oxford. Their love story and their tragedy grows out of McEwan's opening sentence, which contains within its careful confines almost everything you need to know about what follows: 'They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.'

The honeymoon is to take place beside Chesil Beach, in a Georgian hotel. They eat their nuptial supper - melon with glace cherries, slabs of beef with overcooked veg, in their room overlooking the bay - while a pair of waiters, local lads, stands by intrusively. The beach, that unique spit of shingle which runs between the Fleet Lagoon and the Channel, immediately seems emblematic of several things: of this moment of certainty in lives that might never again seem certain; of the path that they have just embarked on together, a path which, like all married couples in love they believe they will be making new; but also of a romance that has taken place between the devil of Middle English rectitude and the deep blue sea of the coming sexual revolution.

Florence yearns for the former; she would rather never have anyone touch her, she believes, even this man she loves. She has been undone by the language of the wedding manual she has been reading (all 'mucous membranes' and 'glans' and 'penetration'). Edward, meanwhile, dreams fervently, silently, of the uninterrupted pleasure that will be theirs now the 'wrangle over the ring' has been sorted. Inevitably, these two worlds have collided several times already, and not favourably.

The 'sort of bargaining' identified by Larkin has at times threatened open conflict. These are still worsted postwar years, at least among Edward and Florence's milieu, and the assault on female virtue and, specifically, on Florence's virtue, has been an attritional endeavour of advance and retrenchment. Though carefully planned at every stage, Edward's campaign had earlier been set back months by his sudden placing of Florence's hand in the vicinity of his groin while they sat together at the cinema watching A Taste of Honey (that harbinger of possibility). Feeling something stir there, beneath the flannel of his trousers, she has leapt into the aisle, screaming.

McEwan is word-perfect at handling the awkward comedy of this relationship and, as ever, turning it into something far more disturbing. Both Edward and Florence fear that she is 'frigid', that antique word, and view that state as an affliction or curse with no remedy. McEwan's subject has often been the way in which innocence goes bad; here, the serpent in the garden is the time-honoured one - desire and its discontents.

The novel that seems to hover around the edges of this book is Philip Roth's Everyman, another short, sharp shock of a story, a slow roasting of a single romantic life (see page 28). You might see McEwan's novel as a very English riposte to Roth; here, a man's life quietly founders not on shifting purpose and infidelity, but on frustration and embarrassment.

McEwan's brilliance as a novelist lies in his ability to isolate discrete moments in a life and invest them with indelible significance: the supermarket scene of The Child in Time, the balloon disaster of Enduring Love. On Chesil Beach is constructed around three such moments - the meal, the urgent fumbling towards consummation and a resultant exchange on the beach itself, which interweave with the grace of a chamber piece. Edward and Florence had always planned to wander the shingle with a risque open bottle of French wine: 'They were going to collect stones along the way and compare their sizes to see if storms really had brought order to the beach.' What they discover, instead, is a wild kind of disorder, where nothing means what they intend.

McEwan interrupts these exchanges with two wonderful chapters of description which detail the chance of Florence and Edward's meeting, and the little mythologies they had established with each other to make love seem like fate. He has the ability to make the conventions of their backgrounds tangible. The village idyll of Edward's childhood is upset by an accident sustained by his mother as the war ends that leaves her simple-minded. Florence is suffocated in a big house off the Banbury Road, overwhelmed by her philosophy don mother and corporate father. The implications of these different registers of upbringing reverberate in unexpected ways as McEwan's tale unfolds. Florence and Edward are relieved that the wedding was not marred by any hint of her parents patronising his, but the English in McEwan's novels do not escape class so easily.

There is a fairy-tale quality to the book, in that everything that follows seems inevitable. The minute currents of tension that change a conversation and a life are so crucial to McEwan's method that it would be unfair to give away every last turn in his narrative. Towards the end, when fates have been sealed, it seems to Edward 'that an explanation of his existence would take up a minute, less than half a page'. Such is the deft compression of McEwan's art here that, in his hands, such a formulation does not seem far from the truth.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

(a good read to go with today's Afghan elections)

A Thousand Splendid Suns

• • Natasha Walter
  • The Guardian

by Khaled Hosseini
384pp, Bloomsbury, £16.99

Anyone whose heart strings were pulled by Khaled Hosseini's first, hugely successful novel, The Kite Runner, should be more than satisfied with this follow-up. Hosseini is skilled at telling a certain kind of story, in which events that may seem unbearable - violence, misery and abuse - are made readable. He doesn't gloss over the horrors his characters live through, but something about his direct, explanatory style and the sense that you are moving towards a redemptive ending makes the whole narrative, for all its tragedies, slip down rather easily.

The Kite Runner was the tale of two Afghan boys struggling to live decent lives amid the warfare and ethnic rivalries of contemporary Afghanistan, and this is the female counterpart. It is both the tale of two women, and a tale of two cities - Herat and Kabul. At the beginning, we are dropped into the world of Mariam, a young girl living alone with her unmarried mother on the outskirts of Herat. And what a sad world it is. Poor Mariam is bullied by her epileptic mother, and she lives for her weekly visits from her insincere, charming father who runs Herat's cinema, and whose real family she longs to join.

We don't stagnate with Mariam in Herat, however - Hosseini likes to move his narratives along - and before many pages have been turned Mariam's mother has died, and her unfeeling father has married her off to an acquaintance from Kabul. Despite the trauma of going to live with a complete stranger who insists that she must wear the burka and hide upstairs when visitors arrive, a tentative hopefulness begins to grow in Mariam that she may be able to win some affection from her husband, especially when she becomes pregnant.

But Hosseini vividly brings home what life is like for women in a society in which they are valued only for reproduction. Once she has suffered a series of miscarriages, Mariam's marriage becomes a prison: "Mariam was afraid. She lived in fear of his shifting moods, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies and sometimes not."

Just as the impatient reader might start to wonder what Hosseini is going to do next with his narrative energy, we switch from Mariam's life to that of a neighbour, the young Laila, who is growing up in a liberal family with a father who believes in her education. This means that we suddenly see Mariam from the outside: Laila never speaks to her, but one day she "passed Rasheed, the shoemaker, with his burka-clad wife, Mariam, in tow". In a flash we see, as Hosseini clearly intends us to, how behind every silent burka in Afghanistan is an individual with a hidden history.

As well as an education, ambitions and opinions, Laila even has a respectful and intelligent boyfriend, who goes with her to the cinema and on a trip to see the Buddhas of Bamiyan. By putting Mariam and Laila in contrast like this, Hosseini is, you feel, not just trying to burrow into individual lives, but also trying to explain the complexities of Afghan society to the reader.

That sense that you are listening to a history lesson as much as experiencing a fiction becomes stronger as the narrative moves on. Hosseini is almost too careful to describe for ignorant westerners the political background to these women's lives, from the Soviet occupation that ruled Laila's childhood to the growing strength of the mujahideen that her brothers join, amid "rising rumours that, after eight years of fighting, the Soviets were losing this war". Once the Soviets are ousted, he takes an even more didactic turn, spelling out how the mujahideen turned from idealised freedom fighters to oppressors. "It was dizzying how quickly everything unravelled. The leadership council was formed prematurely. It elected Rabbani president. The other factions cried nepotism ... Hekmatyar, who had been excluded, was incensed ... The Mujahideen, armed to the teeth but lacking a common enemy, had found the enemy in each other."

But Hosseini doesn't get bogged down in the ins and outs of Afghan politics. His energetic narrative speeds on through the political and domestic worlds, as we move through the tragedies that fall on Laila's family. Eventually we see her, orphaned and alone, allowing herself to become Rasheed's second wife. You might think this novel is becoming too melodramatic, as one horror succeeds another, with rockets blowing families apart and attempted escapes and even murder, alongside the beatings and whippings and threats that make up the women's daily experiences. But when I started to think this I remembered women I met in Kabul, and how many of them had stories to tell almost as melodramatic as this.

Where Hosseini's novel begins to sing is in depicting the slowly growing friendship of the two wives in the face of the horrific abuse from their shared husband. Laila looks at Mariam, and "For the first time, it was not an adversary's face Laila saw but a face of grievances unspoken, burdens gone unprotested, a destiny submitted to and endured. If she stayed, would this be her own face, Laila wondered?" The women's only hope of affection or solidarity is with one another, and they survive not just physically but also emotionally by putting their faith in each other and in their love for Laila's children.

Hosseini does not challenge the usual western view of Afghanistan, but he does enrich it - he adds greater knowledge and understanding to it, and makes the Afghans come alive as loving, feeling individuals. There is something marvellously hopeful in this process, and if there is a problem with the novel, it is not with the plot or the intentions behind it, but with the neatness of its narrative style. Hosseini's prose is stolidly direct, and he tends to explain away not only the political but also the personal, presenting each experience in a wrapper on which the emotion is carefully labelled. Whether it is love - "She had fallen for Tariq. Hopelessly and desperately" - or hate - "What harmful thing had she wilfully done to this man to warrant his malice?" - each distinct emotion is spelled out a touch too clearly.

His desire to believe in the eventual redemption of Afghanistan means that the ending verges on the schmaltzy. Undoubtedly the removal of the Taliban was positive for Afghan women, and we shouldn't be surprised if his characters draw strength from it. But in the last chapter, as the rains return, the cinemas open, the children play and the orphanages are rebuilt, the reader cannot help but feel that Hosseini's understandable longing for a beautiful return to life for the oppressed people of Afghanistan has made for an ending that is just a little flimsy.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

(as recommended to 'Church Times' reading groups on 5th June 2009)

Mistaken identities

Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist is set in the atmosphere of suspicion following the 9/11 attacks

Jim Ottewill

• The Observer, Sunday 11 March 2007

The Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Mohsin Hamid

Hamish Hamilton £14.99, pp192

Mohsin Hamid's second novel is the story of a young Muslim man's loves and losses, daubed against the tumultuous backdrop of the political unrest that followed the attacks on the World Trade Centre on 9/11.

Changez is a young Pakistani who has risen to the top of American society: after graduating from Princeton, he secures a top job on Wall Street and falls in love with a beautiful American woman named Erica. But the collapse of the Twin Towers sends Changez spiralling to the depths of a paranoid crisis of identity. Where does he belong? New York? Lahore? More important, which side should he be fighting for?

During the course of the novel, set during a return visit to Lahore, Changez tells his story to a mysterious American. He explains how he has struggled against the suspicions cast on him where, despite his achievements and ostensible 'Americanness', the colour of his skin is a veil implying 'terrorist.' As afternoon turns to evening on the Lahore street, Hamid cleverly brews an air of simmering distrust between Changez and his listener, subtly juxtaposing light and dark. The novel succeeds in wrapping an exploration of the straining relationship between East and West in a gripping yarn, which remains taut until the final pages.

In the wake of 9/11, the international political landscape has become warped through mutual distrust and political hyperbole. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an elegant and sharp indictment of the clouds of suspicion that now shroud our world.

Crusaders

(Bishop Frank Sargeant in Christmas 2008 Retired Clergy Association newsletter wrote "If you have a Christmas book token, you may like to investigate 'How others see us' by reading 'Crusaders' by Richard T Kelly, published by Faber and Faber at £8.99)

Richard T. Kelly

Richard T. Kelly was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1970, and grew up in Northern Ireland. He has authored three acclaimed ‘oral history’ books on film and filmmakers for Faber: Alan Clarke (1998),The Name of This Book is Dogme 95 (2000), and the authorised biography Sean Penn: His Life and Times (2004). In 2000 he wrote and presented the Channel 4 documentary The Name of This Film is Dogme 95.

Richard T Kelly: On a mission from God

Richard T Kelly's mammoth debut novel traces the links between religion, politics and crime in the North-east. And its troubled hero has more than a touch of one T Blair...

By Joel Rickett

The exposure of property tycoon David Abrahams' donations to the Labour Party has shone fresh light on the North-east's tangled web of politics, business and religion. There's a certain inevitability that on Tony Blair's departure from Downing Street his heartland has come under intense scrutiny as well as how his religious faith shaped his actions in office.

This is precisely the territory charted in Crusaders, the hugely ambitious debut novel by Richard T Kelly. Weighing in at 556 pages, divided into six sections in a quasi 19th-century style, the book feels like it has been chiselled from Gateshead granite. We follow a young Anglican priest, Reverend John Gore, as he attempts to create a church from scratch in a deprived Newcastle-upon-Tyne housing estate in 1996. His mission takes him into the lives of three locals: a gangster, a single mother and a New Labour MP on the make. Religion and politics intertwine as Gore finds himself drawn into a moral quagmire.

"It's a big old novel but when it comes down to it, it's about a priest, a criminal and a girl," Kelly laughs. "From that you can imagine there's going to be a dramatic climax."

The book's genesis was in the mid-1990s when Kelly read about the phenomenon of church "planting" a low-budget version of new church building with an explicit social mission, where congregations are nurtured in public spaces. Then a headline caught his eye: a bouncer had been shot dead, blowing the lid off Newcastle's clubs-and-drugs underworld. In the same spring, Durham boy Tony Blair became leader of Labour Party. "That conjured something a story where the church, politics and crime would be in same mixing bowl," he recalls.

Kelly is a journalist and broadcaster, best known for his books about film history and trivia, most recently Ten Bad Dates With De Niro: A book of alternative film lists. He also helps edit Faber's renowned list of film-related titles. The discipline of his non-fiction background gives the novel its sense of captured veracity: he visited Newcastle's estates, clubs and committee rooms frequently over the last decade to research Crusaders, clutching a tape recorder and a notebook. He is tight-lipped about how far his endeavours took him: "I can only say so much, but some of the book is based on detective work and all the characters are imbued in observational writing. Like any good reporter I know when to make my excuses and leave."

He certainly has the solidly set appearance of a seasoned hack, with a quietly forceful manner. His clear-cut consonants carry a flavour not of the North-east, where he was born, but of Northern Ireland where he grew up, when his father, a chartered loss adjuster, relocated the family for work purposes in the 1970s. We meet at Faber's august offices in Bloomsbury, but I sense he's more at home prowling the provinces, reporting back from the frontline of sitting rooms, pubs and community halls.

Blair himself appears in the story, outmanoeuvring the party's militant ten-dency with a classic speech at a crucial regional AGM. ("The biggest party is the biggest party... and I don't happen to think there should be sects within it.") The Rev Gore carries something of the idealist, Christian socialist Blair about him; a sense that religion can enact material as well as spiritual change, and an almost apologetic style which belies a steely resolution.

"Blair's Durham background and his own religious faith and conservative father are intriguing to me," Kelly says. "When friends asked me what I was writing, I'd jokingly say the hook was that Blair, instead of becoming an Islington barrister, had become a slum priest. I was writing this when his [prime ministerial] honeymoon was over, so I liked the idea of revisiting his earliest incarnation. Like everyone else in the 1980s, Blair had to go to a lot of damn meetings to pick the [Labour] party off the floor."

While Gore regularly questions his own faith, he has an unfashionably clear vision of the need to work among the poor. Kelly resists the temptations to satirise this sense of a calling. "There's something pure and spartan about his mission; his desire and struggle to do good is not something I'm cynical about. He gets in harm's way, argues his corner."

Up in Hoxheath, Gore settles into his council flat and manfully tries to generate interest in his Sunday services, held in a draughty school hall. He draws early crowds and is lauded by the local media, but his pared-down style and considered sermons are no match for the happy-clappy evangelicals who are taking over a nearby parish. "Gore is from the tradition of radical doubt questioning the tenets of faith while wanting to keep alive the 'rumour of God'," Kelly says. "But it becomes clear he's slightly on the wrong side of history."

In his naivety, Gore is drawn to local hardman Stevie Coulson, accepting his help and donations while turning a blind eye to the nasty side of his activities. He also takes tips from a sharp-tongued single mother, Lindy, who sees through his pulpit performances. Inevitably they end up in bed together but it is a relationship fraught by class differences and by Gore's abiding sense of guilt.

Then there's Martin Pallister MP, a former director of the Tyneside Regenerative Economics Corporation with a drawer full of corporate consultancies. Gore is suspicious of Pallister's overtures, but he's not caricatured as a charlatan. "It's right that we shout at politicians when we hear them canting on, but it's also true that the government is not Christ and his 12 disciples they have jobs to do," Kelly says firmly. "Pragmatism is hard choice but it is unavoidable."

Worlds clash old and New Labour, old miners and the media, the liberal Anglicans and the evangelicals, welfare dependency and big business, brothels and Sunday services. Flashbacks flesh out the interior worlds and histories of the four main characters "we see how political economy inflects their life choices" as they draw perilously close, despite Gore's bids to extricate himself.

The dilemma centres on when he'll face up to his antagonists, and ultimately himself: "He has enough fortitude and intelligence to carry so far but the drama of the book is about where he's deficient." Yet again Kelly refuses to be ruthless in judgement: "One has to be wary of sanctimony how much do any of us live up to the vaunted tasks that we give ourselves? It ain't easy."

The book carries a debt of love to the stark, post-industrial splendour of the North-east. The dialogue is rendered in thick Geordie, laced with "yee" and "wisnae" and "summat". Kelly knew the risks of trying to reproduce this dialect phonetically, but was confident that Geordie has currency thanks to Viz and Our Friends in the North. "I decided I'd go in with both feet." The gamble pays off spectacularly, particularly when it comes to bar-stool banter: "Aye, but guess what, Fatha... Steve gans to the Toon but he's a mackem, yknaa?"

At times the writing is darkly humorous, but Kelly's seriousness of intent and direct moral interrogation call to mind contemporary American giants Roth and Mailer. As does the panoramic sweep: rather than Brooklyn warehouses, the backdrop to Crusaders is the scarred mines, skeletal steel arches and rising call-centre blocks of North- east England.

Mailer, he says approvingly, was "never afraid of turning out a 1,000-page book, with 'To be continued' at the end". This chutzpah seems to have inspired Kelly. "You can only write the novel you felt the call to write. But I have to beg the patience of a lot of readers." They will surely be drawn in as the narrative reaches a thrilling crescendo. Crusaders is a powerful, assured literary arrival that will create loyal congregations of devoted followers. *

The extract

Crusaders, By Richard T Kelly (Faber 12.99)

'Despair crawled over Gore, that this awful man wouldn't leave him to his slumber ... "It's not your Church, Simon you didn't make it, you don't own it. You think your lot could ever get it back to what it was? ... Not in a million years. You'd drive away twice as many as you ever got in, I'd bet any money."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. Because you're a bigot. It's all just poison comes out of you. Anyone can see it a mile off. It'd be too much fun just to ignore you. You'd make me want to kiss a man on the mouth just to get you to fuck off."

Barlow lunged at him. For a sick instant, Gore thought they would fight.'