REVIEW
A problem for novelists Joseph Shaw on the difficulties of writing Catholic fiction
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n the last issue I reviewed William Whyte’s Unlocking the Church, about the movement, within Anglicanism and from about 1830, for a form of church architecture and corresponding programme of church restoration, which saw churches as sacred spaces, so filled with symbolic references that they could be read like a book. It might sound a dry subject but it aroused fierce passions at the time, and among other manifestations it gave rise to an entire sub-genre of novels and poetry. The Tractarians and others involved in the debate decided that in order to made the points they wished to make, they needed to employ a wide range of literary forms. The great majority of their fiction output was—according to Whyte—terrible, from a literary point of view. It is hard to know how much of an impact it had in its day: it is all long forgotten now, although the related output of John Henry Newman, such as his novel Loss and Gain, is still read today. But it is a natural thought that fiction, as well as non-fiction writing, should play a part in the spreading of a theological message, and bridge the gap between the abstract and the personal, the academic and the popular. One reason why the Tractarian novelists and poets wrote such bad stuff was that they were amateurs. Another, however, is specific to the task they had set themselves: of trying to persuade their readers of a laundry list of abstract theological points through the pages of their books. It is extremely difficult to do this while still penning a convincing story. The reader of a novel must be interested in the characters in the story to carry on reading, and if events are being driven by ideological necessity rather than by psychology, or if the action is interspersed by clumsy editorial comment, then the book ceases to be interesting. This is a problem for novelists of all ideological persuasions, and catches up even with professional writers. This may sound surprising, because fiction is such a powerful medium of persuasion, and has been used to such devastating effect in our own lifetimes
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to attack the traditional family and gender-roles, the historical role of the Church, and so on. But these attacks have been most effective when they have been oblique. Thousands of films presenting traditional domestic life as an intolerable servitude for women, for example, have left their mark on society precisely because they did not proclaim their ideological distortions in the opening credits, but aimed, primarily, to tell an entertaining story and make money. The new generation of directors who can’t touch a Star Wars episode, Disney re-make, or Agatha Christie adaptation, without turning it into antipatriarchy shout-fest, simply turn off their audiences. We are fortunate, in the English language, to have superb authors who tell stories which reflect a subtle but all-pervading Catholic vision of the world and of human nature, in a way which is not off-putting to nonCatholics: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Alexander Pope, Chesterton,
'I wish the best of luck to Catholics writing now, particularly those of a traditional cast of mind who see that what afflicts the human spirit today is, as it always has been, the absence of God’s grace...'
Evelyn Waugh, Tolkein, and Graham Greene in his good moments. We do, of course, need new ones, to tackle the issues, genres, and needs of each new generation. In the Traditional Catholic movement, we even have a few novels which address the liturgical crisis more directly. I have in the past reviewed Natalia Sanmartin’s wonderful The Awakening of Miss Prim; earlier, there was the more lightweight but entertaining Smoke in the Sanctuary by Stephen Oliver, and from an earlier era, Alice Thomas Ellis’ The Sin Eater, and the profound and moving Judith’s Marriage by Fr Bryan Houghton, which I gather will soon be back in print, with his other two works, Mitre and Crook and Rejected Priest. Of all these, only Miss Prim and The Sin Eater are books one could give to a non-trad, let alone a non-Catholic. Even with Miss Prim one would be taking a risk, not because the needs of the message have overwhelmed the needs of the story, but because of the Catholic setting. One can hardly forget that Catholic matters are at issue in the story, when it is set in a sort of Catholic colony, though even this is done with a very light touch. One can avoid even this, like my brother’s Ten Weeks in Africa (written under the name J.M.Shaw), but obviously it is difficult to drill into the most detailed Catholic issues without letting on. This task is handled in a very unique way by the American Catholic convert of an older generation, Flannery O’Connor. I wish the best of luck to Catholics writing now, particularly those of a traditional cast of mind who see that what afflicts the human spirit today is, as it always has been, the absence of God’s grace, and that those significant chance events which mark the turning points of our personal narratives are those in which created things are called upon to play a role in grace’s work. The novelist’s task is to make that process comprehensible, without making it appear crude and obvious. To see the Lord of History at work while respecting the autonomy of each human agent is not an easy task: it is a divine one.
SPRING 2019
