Be Near Me

Andrew O'Hagan

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Review

Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel tells the story of Father David, a Catholic priest who goes to work in a Scottish working-class community on the Ayrshire coast.  The clash of values that follows guarantees that he comes to grief on the prejudices and hatred which are the community’s only binding force.

After a short glimpse of him with his mother, we first see Father David in Dalgarnock through his relationship with Mrs Poole, his housekeeper.  ‘You’ve a bit of education up yer sleeve, Father,’ she says to him.  Although not slow to criticise, it is clear that Mrs Poole admires her employer.  Father David enjoys this arrangement: he likes being kept on his toes by Mrs Poole.  He doesn’t mean to be complacent and, with his pictures and his books and his thinking, it’s possible that he will bring value into the lives of his parishioners.

‘An empty explosives factory marks the skyline of Dalgarnock, but the better part of the town seems to be given over to black and white council houses with windows the size of bibles.’  There is a superb description of some men watching him pass in the street which concludes, ‘their smiles turned sinister when I lifted my hand to return the smile, as if war songs suddenly echoed in their blood at the sight of my insulting friendliness.’  Although Father David means well, this is Scotland and he is English, despite having been born in Edinburgh.  It becomes clear that he is out of place when his involvement with two hooligan teenagers is complicated by his desire for the boy, Mark, whom he tries to kiss in a brief moment of drug-induced oblivion at the rectory.  He is seen by Mrs Poole when she comes in for her morning shift.

O’Hagan’s treatment of this situation, which in other hands could easily be facile, offensive and lurid, is immensely sensitive.  There are no clichés in this book.  The language is precisely attuned to the circumstances, it is felt rather than imposed, so that the story seems to be released by it instead of merely enabled, like a piece of music in the hands of a virtuoso musician.  Time and again, unobtrusive phrases and rhythms elegantly conjure resonances: the children with their ‘small energies of disdain’; ‘…one day we wake in a strange place and find we know those values most intimately by their absence from every scene except the scene in our own heads.’

It turns out that the intimately known value in Father David’s head is that of love, for when he was a student at Oxford in the 1960s he was in love with another boy, who died.  The Oxford scenes are the only discordant ones in the novel – the students are too clever, too irritating – but the evocation of David’s love remains authentic both in its initial phase and in the way in which it has worked on him subsequently, making him what he is.  Love survives in him not just as a casket of memories but as a profound sense of having experienced value in his life, which later makes him reach out for value.  The experience of love has been a dynamic force in him.

Father David’s appreciation of beauty – music, wine, art, aestheticism – seems absurd in the context of the working-class Scottish parish – and yet he does bring something real.  Not to Mark, perhaps, nor Lisa, but at least to Mrs Poole.  The only real witness of his folly, she is also the only one to understand it (apart from his mother), and the only one to be genuinely upset.  But she forgives him, whereas the salivating lynch-mob that drives him out discovers in its shared prejudices a repellent, sustaining bond which is reflected, with great skill, in references to the invasion of Iraq and the world at large.  It is notable too that while others (especially Mark) often tell Father David that he has no experience of life, he is the only one who seems to have loved someone, and to have felt loved.

O’Hagan does not offer the cheap thrill of suggesting that Father David is redeemed by a love that has so obviously destroyed him.  Yet there is always redemption, of a sort, to be found in a work that portrays tragedy with such intelligence, tenderness and honesty.

Reviewed in the Literary Review - review by Johnny de Falbe