THE TRUE FACE OF A PRIEST

Reviews by Paul Scott
Country Life, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3418
September 6, 1962
pg. 545

         MISS JENNIFER LASH's new novel, The Climate of Belief (Gollancz, 16s), is a work of genuine creation that defies usual classification:  and this is remarkable because its author was only 22 when she finished it.

         Scores of young people can (and do) observe the world about them and string words together to record it all accurately enough to pass muster as promising young novelists in the dramatic-documentary tradition.  But Miss Lash is engaged in the difficult task of giving shape to ideas and abstractions:  belief in, and love of God:  belief in, and love of self.  This, you must admit, is a change from then monotony of miserable affairs in bleak bed-sitters -- the more usual end-product of a literal interpretation of the advice to young writers:  Write only of what you know.

           Her main character is a priest, Dom Lucius Trehearne.  "He had, so it was said by women of piety, the true face of a monk, of a man of prayer."  He is a member of a religious community in a place called Credon, an intellectual who has studied in Rome and of whom great things are expected.  Living near the abbey is a young woman, Isabella Barton.  Her husband is away in the army and her young son is dangerously ill.  She is lonely and spiritually afraid.  She persuades herself that she is in love with Lucius, and cannot resist the temptation to tell him so.

                           Response to Love

           Lucius has a problem, too.  As a priest, he "believes but cannot love."  His response to Isabella's declaration is curious, but carries with it the ring of truth.  He tells his Abbot what has passed between them and at the same time seems to use her statement, "I love you, Lucius," as a revelation of his own capacity for love, not of Isabella, but of his own Maker.  The abbot, an elderly man much in demand as a speaker on religious broadcasts, says:  "It is possible to imagine that one is loved," but presently he sends Lucius away to a curacy in a working-class district.

            Also sent away is a young novice, Jonathan.  Jonathon loves Lucius and hates his mother.  He has no vocation.  In the end he commits suicide; Isabella Barton is reunited with her husband; Lucius returns to Credon --"One man among many men, he was almost no man.  Within the structures of his choice he prayed, slept and was silent.  Having believed, having trusted, finally he lived totally with love."

             In bare outline the novel sounds thin:  but Miss Lash is exploring a theme that would extend the most experienced novelist.  She has been courageous enough to try to convey the nature of men's and women's changing images of God and of one another:  and since that is something that will probably claim her attention all her working life it seems to me irrevelant that towards the end of this book her shifting comprehension of the subject leads her into obscurities not every reader will have the patience to consider.

              "Such is the climate of belief, a prism held in the Creator's palmm where each man, a crystal slant, varies in clarity and capacity.  A mosaic of men refracting light from the Light from which all being is."

               This, like many a final paragraph in many a novel, is a last-minute attempt to catch something of a meaning that the narrative itself has failed to make clear, and provide the reader with a key to the book as a whole.  In time I think she will find such appendages unnecessary because she already writes with skill and economy, and moves painlessly from one scene and situation to another.

                 What has so far eluded her (apart from a weight of years) is the knack of lighting each scene so that it represents, to the reader, a definite stage in the novel's inner progress.  While the author's comprehension is shifting and changing, that lighting is bound to be dim, however technically expert she is, so in the end her novel's fault is the natural, dynamic fault of her youth, and I'm encouraged by that thought in my opinion of her as a potentially important new voice.