From Publishers Weekly
Initially, this latest work by prolific novelist ( Daughters of Albion ) and biographer ( Jesus ) Wilson, apparently invites readers onto his familiar, comfortably bourgeois and somewhat parochial territory, only to veer from the vicarage and village drawing rooms into darker, unexpectedly stark regions of the heart and mind. Out of love with his wife, life and God, faithless Anglican clergyman Francis Kreer finds his mother's death the coup de grace. Sent hurtling into the maw of midlife crisis, he clings desperately to the hope offered by his newfound love for a teenage runaway. Out of this story, whose twists and turns constantly confound expectations, Wilson fashions a somber meditation on the power of love in a godless and virtually hopeless world. Echoes of Austen--in his surprisingly wide-ranging and barbed social critique--and Dickens--in the panoply of types from John Major's Britain (gay priest, junkie thief, lecherous vet), that throng his pages--show Wilson to be aiming high. Even his most infuriating tics (e.g., lengthy digressions into the arcana of Anglo - Catholic devotional practice) are testimony to his ambitious reach. If Wilson's narrative eventually spirals out of his control on its breathless way to a Christmas Day climax on London's sunless streets, readers will surely forgive him after a journey far more unsettling and moving than any offered by his previous work.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In his 1992 biography, Wilson made clear his acceptance of the human, but rejection of the divine, Jesus ( Jesus, LJ 9/15/92). This theme carries over into his latest and, to date, best novel, in which he takes on the Anglican church and middle-class sanctimony. Francis Kreer, the vicar of sorrows, is a clergyman who has lost his belief in God and is trapped in a loveless marriage. He remains a faithful shepherd to his flock until a chain of events, triggered by his mother's death and the discovery that she once had an illicit love affair, propels him into madness and despair. Job-like, he loses all he holds dear and is "compelled to confront the terrible truth about life on this planet," truth that the biblical writers understood but that the bland bishops do not: "the fact of death, the fact of evil, the difficulty of virtue, the fickleness of one's own heart." God may not exist, but the human heart still needs to find him. It is this fact, Wilson suggests, that makes us "beautiful beings." Wilson's send-up of the Anglican clergy and the all-too-typical "parishoner" frequently lighten the otherwise serious tone of this Waugh-like work. Highly recommended for serious collections of British fiction.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
