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Poor Souls is a Catholic novel.

What is a Catholic novel? Do protagonists who happen to be Catholics make a Catholic novel? I don’t think so. Most of the characters in Candide are Catholic but no one native to planet earth would label Candide a Catholic novel. Do the religious origins of the writer serve to categorize a work? Hardly, or all the Joyces and Conrads would be Catholic novelists.

A Catholic novel is more easily recognized than defined. However, if a definition is required perhaps it could be along the lines of: ‘the intention of the writer to highlight the ordinary, and indeed the sinful, as being transformed by grace into something worthy of God.’ What distinguishes the ‘Catholic’ here from Protestant Christianity, and any other well-meaning syllabus of religious thought, is the juxtaposition of ‘sinfulness’ with ‘worthy of God’.

This paradox is the mother of all paradoxes but, accept it or not, it contains the ingredients to make the ‘Catholic novel’ the most adventurous of adventure stories, the most romantic of romances, the most thrilling of thrillers, though all these assets are necessarily veiled in subtleties, subtleties which are only perceptible to minds attuned to on-going prayer and the Eucharist.

Considered in the light of this definition, Poor Souls qualifies as a front-runner of the Catholic novel, though this is not immediately apparent because of its unpretentiousness. It doesn’t aim at the high drama of a Graham Greene or the fetching mystical aura of Diary of a Country Priest. There are no saints in these pages. Nor are there any interesting sinners. And the conversation level among the priests is almost sub-Sit-Com. The parish, in some undefined urban area of the United States, has the unlikely name Our Lady of the Poor and Forgotten Souls in Purgatory. This is the Poor Souls of the title which everyone, with Gogolian irony, miscalls Lost Souls.

Martin Flanagan, a young seminarian, spends a season of work experience here. The clergy are not models of piety, but they are not fiends in disguise either. The local bishop and his vicar general are seen by the clergy as incompetents. (Is Numbnoddle really a suitable name for a bishop outside the pages of a Swift or an Arthur Heller?) The priest’s housekeeper is a forceful character who actually dishes up crow and laxative to the Episcopal guest. The occasional parishioner who puts in an appearance is lack-lustre, apart from Peggy who Martin is forced to share a chaste motel bed with one night. That, refreshingly, is the book’s sex quota. Oh, and Sean, Martin’s brother who, for the time being anyway, has chosen conventional waywardness as an escape from the apparent strictures of Faith.

The villain of the piece (with a name like Father Robin wouldn’t you know it!) is the Johnny-come-lately pp who removes the pews and reorganizes the parish with consulting any one. He himself is removed, the reader is cheered to learn. Another priest has married a nun and is now a widower. He has never been anything but a priest in his own eyes. He dies, and his Christian burial is a matter of contention between the vicar general (anti) and the new incumbent (pro). That’s about it, really. Doesn’t amount to much in precis, does it? So why does it haunt me and why do I want to hail it as an outstanding Catholic novel?

Perhaps because the writer is an unswervingly honest professional with something pertinent to say. Perhaps because he says it with quiet sobriety. Perhaps because his characterization is, on the whole, effortlessly satisfying. But these are the stuff of any novel worthy of mention. The difference with the Catholic novel is that imagination and experience are not the only shapers of the work. The habit of prayer is behind every move of at least some of the characters, prayer that is heard and answered and the effects of which are transmitted to the reader on levels that the writer is not ultimately master of. It is in this soil that the genius of Poor Souls has its roots. It employs the banality of everyday living to convey the Catholic element without ever resorting to signs and wonders or, worse, ‘pious-speak’. Indeed it is so sanely ordinary that any curious non-Catholic reader might be excused from wondering what apart from a few obscure doctrines distinguishes RCS from other believers.

And do you know how the writer achieves it –at least for this reader? He pops in little quotes at the head of each chapter. Nothing unusual in that, you might say, but it is the uncompromisingly traditional Catholic spirituality of the quotes that lifts the reader above the humdrum march of daily events. St Therese, St. Benedict, the Gospels, Shakespeare, great and simple contrasts standing in the deserts as signposts to the stars.

Theotokos Catholic Books - Book Reviews Section - www.theotokos.org.uk