The innocent nightmare

NEW NOVELS
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THE CLIMATE OF BELIEF
by Jennifer Lash
Gollancz, 16s.
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A Review by Anthony Burgess
The Observer
26 August 1962
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       WHEN I say that Jennifer Lash was 22 when she finished The Climate of Belief  I imply no attitude.  We're offered no bookseller's discount because of her youth.  This youth will not explain away the faults of her work, but it will at least explain them.  Partly, anyway.  The lack of humour, for instance: the monotony of texture; word-play which does not come off.

            After this we can mention her virtues.  "The Climate of Belief" is an ambitious attempt to analyze one type of religious mind -- that of Dom Lucius Trehearne, a monk of great intellectual endowments (these are not demonstrated) who is quite incapable of selfless love.  When Isabella Barton asks him for it in a time of great need ("love" in English is blessedly ambiguous), all he can do is to point at the firefolk sitting in the air:  "Look, look up at the sky, and yet in our stupidity we doubt!"  He also lets down young Jonathan Sargent, who thinks at first he has a vocation but eventually commits suicide.  Dom Lucius says he loves God but, naturally, we doubt it.

            Miss Lash gives a very accurate picture of a male religious community and a devastating one of the Abbot  "a man of middle height, middle size, and it would be unfair to say, of middle mind," always with a railway timetable in his pocket, much called on to open new secondary modern schools and take part in B.B.C. debates on euthanasia.  But this is not a wicked book; it is full of desperate seriousness.  Time, if Miss Lash sticks to her evident vocation, will sort all that out.