Review

Be Near Me

By Andrew O'Hagan

Published by Faber

Father David Anderton is an educated man.

He enjoys the best wines and classical music. Schooled at Ampleforth, which ‘had a way of making one feel more fixed in the world’, he ‘followed the monks in feeling that being a little absent was infinitely better than being too present.’ This way of being continued at Oxford in the 1960s, where he was drawn first into a group of self-conscious aesthetes and later affected by the fervour of that revolutionary decade. A career in the Church followed, quietly undertaking pastoral work in Lancashire.

Now, to be nearer his mother in Edinburgh, David has become priest to the bitter Ayrshire town of Dalgarnock, as far a cry from Balliol and the old women of Blackpool as it is possible to be on this small island. In Dalgarnock, unemployment and alcoholism have bred an inevitable brutishness in the town’s inhabitants (‘He had a certain sleepy menace. A depressed look.’) that a sophisticated man like Father David is ill-equipped (or insufficiently motivated) to change for the better.

His comfortable life at the rectory – enhanced by his banter with the redoutable housekeeper Mrs Poole – does little to help bridge the divide. David occasionally teaches at the local school: ‘One got the impression the staff believed very strongly that education was a matter of bitter entrenchment as opposed to any sort of managed revelation, and they seemed in cahoots with the children when it came to the sorry victory of rights over responsibilities.’

Nevertheless, David perseveres and befriends a couple of young people, Mark and Lisa. Perhaps because he had ‘got to the ridiculous age when one looks to see what one has found in the universe’, perhaps because he sees – in Mark particularly – intelligence beneath the bravado, drinking and drug-taking, David is drawn into the young people’s world. It is a path that will lead to transgression and retribution.

As one would expect from an intellectual man, David narrates his story meticulously and with great thought. Reminiscing about the poems of Wallace Stevens, he begins ‘to see that the search for happiness is all we have. To sit in a park and listen to the dogs barking; to sit in a park and hear church bells: are we not always present, always human and always religious according to our faith?’

However, he gives himself away as well, much in the way that the diaries of young Edmund Talbot exposed his naivete in William Golding’s To the Ends of the Earth seafaring trilogy. In a teeth-grindingly patronising exchange with the school’s music teacher, David reveals both his pomposity and his absolute disconnection with the real world. These will be the instruments of his undoing in Dalgarnock.

Towards the end of the book, David recalls a short conversation with a hard-of-hearing parishioner from Blackpool. '"We were very wise!"' he shouts at her, describing his university days. ‘“Oh good,” she said. “Good. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of wise.”’ Indeed not.

Like Robertson Davies’ novels, Be Near Me is intellectual in the very best sense of the word; poetry, religion, politics, music, art and dinner party debates have their natural place in a story dominated by a man whose sheltered life of thought and prayer is irrevocably altered in shocking and heartbreaking circumstances.

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

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