Take notes, Dan Brown. Here’s a real papal thriller
Piers Paul Read's latest novel is ingenious but never improbable, says Francis Phillips
24 July 2009

The Death of a Pope
By Piers Paul Read
Ignatius Press / Family Publications, £19.95

The late Kingsley Amis used to say he preferred to read novels that began with the sentence: "A shot rang out". Piers Paul Read's opening sentence is just as good, if less of a cliché: "In the dock behind a screen of thick glass sit the three accused men."

From here to the end it is hard to put his latest novel down; he knows exactly how to pace and structure the narrative so as to capture and hold the attention, and by deliberately employing the present tense the reader's focus is kept at the heart of the action.

Read has written a thoroughly modern thriller, involving international terrorism, Sarin gas, Third World aid, MI5 and a papal conclave.

If this sounds a melodramatic, even toxic, mixture, I hasten to add that the novel is as far from the Dan Brown school of writing as it is possible to be.

The author combines a sophisticated handling of detail with a shrewd and cosmopolitan perspective on the Catholic scene, both in England and abroad.

The book's plot - I won't spoil the fun by explaining it - is highly ingenious but never preposterous.

But for 9/11, I would have described the sequence of events as rather improbable; but after 2001 and the destruction of the Twin Towers the possibilities of terror seem limitless. The central characters are Kate Ramsey, an Oxford-educated journalist and lapsed Catholic in her early 30s - "a Sloane with attitude" - and Juan Uriarte, a Basque ex-Jesuit and former liberation fighter in El Salvador, now a dedicated aid worker in Darfur for a Catholic charity, Misericordia.

Read is excellent in his depiction of both people: Kate, the privileged English girl, confused and idealistic, who longs to do something to alleviate suffering but doesn't "know what or how", and Uriarte, the fanatic, who combines a sense of divine mission with a willingness to kill for the cause, believing that the means will be justified by the ends.

Minor characters are Fr Luke Scott, Kate's uncle, an elderly priest with traditionalist sympathies, who suffers from spiritual fatigue, and Cardinal Doornik, a liberal member of the Dutch hierarchy with an uneasy past and barely concealed ambition to lead the Church when the ailing John Paul II has died.

These two are less convincing portraits; in particular, it is hard to see the cardinal as "a man of prayer", as Read describes him; he seems to me more a worldly figure who has long compromised his priestly vocation.

It is difficult to write a Catholic novel in today's climate. Indeed this book, judged not commercial enough for an English readership, has been published in America.

This is a great pity for it has a thoroughly English feel and atmosphere, though the questions it raises are hardly parochial. Kate is a convincing and sympathetic portrayal of a familiar figure: an impressionable girl almost waiting to come under the influence of a charismatic personality, quickly sharing both his bed and his twisted logic.

Read avoids the obvious temptations of a modern Catholic novel: covertly preaching his own position at the reader, so that one is buttonholed with authorial orthodox zeal, or setting up Catholic beliefs - in the manner of David Lodge - simply in order to mock them.

Instead, he combines an understanding of the different and contradictory positions of his characters with an occasional lightly ironic touch. The depiction of Uriarte is a singular achievement; although he is entirely at odds with his creator it is impossible not to see Kate's attraction towards him or to feel some kinship with his outlook, however repellent his tactics.

In his next novel I hope Read will invent a holy priest. He knows how to describe the other types with deftness and assurance, but if he wants to "combine his faith with his talent to help democracy heal itself from the deficit of truth" (I quote his own words from his 1997 essay, "The Catholic Novelist in a Secular Age") he needs to show truth convincingly embodied in a human being. Then he might move that sluggish, scornful and secular English heart.