Initial Thoughts on Hemingway's Catholicism

I was rather surprised to discover that, for much of his adult life, Ernest Hemingway was a Catholic. The image Hemingway projected to the world doesn't exactly suggest pious devotion but, according to one distinguished critic, we need to take his Catholicism seriously if we are to understand some of his greatest books:

"Beginning with his wounding and near-death experience on an Italian battlefield in 1918, and continuing with increasing intensity through the early and mid-1920s, Hemingway's personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest, in his life and his work, by profound engagement with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of Toreo, or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage).

"Hemingway's rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper. Before his twenty-eighth birthday (in 1927), he has accepted the tradition, the authority, and the discipline of Rome and formalized his conversion. Far from being a "nominal" or "bogus" Catholic as some biographers would have it, Hemingway is a devout practicing Catholic for much of his life. He believed that "the only way he could run his life decently was to accept the discipline of the Church," and he could not imagine taking any other religion seriously (Baker, Life Story 333)."

These ideas are developed more fully here and, even more fully, in "In the Nominal Country of the Bogus: Hemingway's Catholicism and the Biographies." Hemingway: Essays of Reassessment, ed. Frank Scafella.  New York: Oxford UP, 1991. 105-40.

I'll post a few thoughts on A Farewell to Arms and Hemingway's Catholicism after Easter.

Graham Greene

I've just come across an interesting article about Greene. I don't agree with everything the author says about the modern reader or about Greene himself but he certainly raises some interesting questions.

Flannery O'Connor: Assaulting the Imagination

There is an interesting article in last week's English-language version of L'Osservatore Romano (6th April) on Flannery O'Connor. The article, entitled ''Assaulting the Imagination", is adapted by Michael Paul Gallagher S.J. from his recent book, Faith Maps. There's not a great deal that's new in it but it does provide a useful overview of O'Connor's theological approach from a Professor of Fundamental Theology. 

All Quiet on the Western Front

I recently returned from a trip with my students to the cemeteries and battlefields around Ypres and the Somme and while I was there I read Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, one of the greatest pieces of literature to have emerged from the Great War.

Remarque was baptised and raised a Catholic. He was educated in Catholic schools and attended a Catholic teachers' seminary until he was called up in 1916 and then injured at Passchendaele. So it seems reasonable to ask what impact Catholicism had on his most famous book.

It is something of a cliché that religious belief was one of the casualties of the war and, at first glance, All Quiet on the Western Front seems to bear the cliché out. While meeting the bereaved mother of one of his fellow soldiers, Paul Bäumer, the narrator (or, at least, the first of the novel's two narrators) says, "God, is there anything I hold sacred? You soon change your views on that sort of thing where we are."

However, as Brian Murdoch  points out in the Afterword to his translation of the novel, "All Quiet on the Western Front is not a memoir." It is a work of fiction and we have to see this narratorial comment in the context of the whole novel, a novel in which, to quote Brian Murdoch again, "the motif of the inextinguishable spark of life in man" cannot be ignored.

Murdoch does not explicitly link this spark of life with Catholicism but there is surely some link: when, later in the book, the narrator finds himself in a Catholic infirmary he declares that "this is a piece of good luck, because the Catholic hospitals are known for good treatment and good food." 

The place clearly has its faults - the nuns are criticized for praying loudly in the corridor with the doors open - but it is still a place where utter cynicism cannot survive: "There is no one who wouldn't do anything in the world for Sister Tina, a wonderful nurse, who cheers up the whole wing, even when we can only see her from a distance," Bäumer tells us. 

And when we are tempted to see her as an isolated good egg, he reminds us that "there are a few more like her. We'd go through hell and high water for them."

Of course, there's a great deal more to the novel than these hospital scenes. There is much that is harrowing (as well as much that is funny) in its pages. And, given what we know already about Bäumer's ability to lie about the circumstances of his friend's death, it's impossible to draw much consolation from the way his own death is presented at the end of the novel.

And yet, despite the horrors it describes, this is not a book without hope, nor a book that is entirely free of the consolations of religion. Remarque went on to write plenty more novels after this one: I shall now be making a conscious effort to seek them out.

Bringing Catholic Culture Back Into the English Curriculum

I have just had an article published in Faith Magazine on 'Bringing Catholic Culture Back into the English Curriculum'. This is the fullest statement of my ideas to have appeared in print so far and I hope it helps provoke a debate. Any thoughts gratefully received.

The Man Booker International Prize and John Henry Newman

Looking through the list of finalists for this year's Man Book International Prize which was announced today, I was reminded of something Newman wrote in The Idea of a University:


"First, then, it is to be considered that, whether we look to countries Christian or heathen, we find the state of literature there as little satisfactory as it is in these islands; so that, whatever are our difficulties here, they are not worse than those of Catholics all over the world. I would not indeed say a word to extenuate the calamity, under which we lie, of having a literature formed in Protestantism; still, other literatures have disadvantages of their own; and, though in such matters comparisons are impossible, I doubt whether we should be better pleased if our English Classics were tainted with licentiousness, or defaced by infidelity or scepticism. I conceive we should not much mend matters if we were to exchange literatures with the French, Italians, or Germans."



I don't agree with everything Newman wrote in this particular essay but I do recognise the temptation to look for greener grass in the literature of other countries. So what do we find when we examine the list of finalists? Amin Maalouf, who explores his own complex identity in Origins and In the Name of Identity, is a Catholic but the writers from Catholic Spain and Italy (Juan Goytisolo and Dacia Maraini) are less than enthusiastic about the Church. The Australian, David Malouf, though baptised a Catholic, seems to have stopped going to mass as a teenager. Marilynne Robinson is a Calvinist and Philip Pullman we all know about.


Does this mean that these writers are not worth reading? Of course not: they are all fine writers. But it does mean that we are going to be frustrated if we look to other countries for something we can't find in our own. To return to Newman: "One literature may be better than another, but bad will be the best, when weighed in the balance of truth and morality. It cannot be otherwise; human nature is in all ages and all countries the same; and its literature, therefore, will ever and everywhere be one and the same also. Man's work will savour of man; in his elements and powers excellent and admirable, but prone to disorder and excess, to error and to sin. Such too will be his literature; it will have the beauty and the fierceness, the sweetness and the rankness, of the natural man, and, with all its richness and greatness, will necessarily offend the senses of those who, in the Apostle's words, are really "exercised to discern between good and evil.""

A Literary Challenge

How about this for a literary challenge? Let's say there are roughly 33 weeks in a school year - and, yes, I am embarrassed to type that - then could we (or our students) create a History of English Literature in 33 texts? Or, if we give ourselves three years and one text a week, a History of English Literature in 99 texts? It's the literary equivalent of A History of the World in 100 Objects.

I'm quite looking forward to constructing a History of English Literature ... in Reverse, starting with the 21st Century and working my way backwards. Each text and accompanying comments about interesting literary features must fit onto an A4 sheet of paper.

I'm also going to give the task to some of my students. It will be good for some of the older ones to think about how literary canons are formed. It will raise all sorts of questions: which authors, which genres, which genders, which religious affiliations, which countries, which languages, which dates? 

Any suggestions gratefully received.

When Historical Memory Fails

There is a slightly bizarre quotation from Stephen Layton in today's Telegraph: "when it comes to choral singing," he claims, "we are the best in the world, with a tradition stretching back to the Reformation". Is he really claiming that there was no decent choral singing in England before the Reformation? 


It seems hard to believe but we see much the same with literature. As far as many schools and exam boards are concerned we have a great tradition stretching back to the Reformation. But before that English Literature wasn't worth bothering with. And anyway it's too difficult to read. And we weren't taught it ourselves at university.


Fortunately, there are some good resources out there to help us cope with this failure of historical memory.

The Bells of Nagasaki

We should be careful not to make crass comparisons but I can't help but be reminded of Takashi Nagai's wonderful The Bells of Nagasaki at the moment. Nagai was a Catholic radiologist who survived the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan's most Catholic city, and described his experiences before, during and after the bombing in a wonderfully restrained manner. He did not shirk the hard questions (indeed, he came up with some arresting answers) but his book focuses more on human stories than on hard political or theological issues.

You can also read about Nagai in this book from Ignatius Press but I'd definitely start with The Bells of Nagasaki.

Words of the Week

As well as a Poem of the Week, I also have a Word of the Week in my classroom. Next week's word is going to be Lent, which is a shortened form of the now obsolete lenten, which in Old English simply meant spring. In fact, as the OED explains, "The ecclesiastical sense of the word is peculiar to English; in the other Germanic languages the only sense is ‘spring’."

In a few weeks, I shall choose Easter. Again the OED makes some interesting points. Not only does it explain the derivation - "from Eostre (Northumbrian spelling of Éastre), the name of a goddess whose festival was celebrated at the vernal equinox; her name (:—Old Germanic *austrôn- cogn. w. Sanskrit usrā dawn; see east v.) shows that she was originally the dawn-goddess" - but it also points out that the festival corresponds "to the Jewish passover, the name of which it bears in most of the European langs. (Greek πασχά, < Hebrew pésaḥ, Latin pascha, French Pâques, Italian Pasqua, Spanish Pascua, Dutch pask)."

Alexander Pope: Part 1

There is an interesting article by Brian Young on ‘Pope and ideology’ in The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope. “This essay,” he says in the opening sentence, “will unpack the simple statement that Alexander Pope was born to Catholic parents in 1688, and that he died in 1744, still a Catholic.”

Young reminds us that, in Pope’s day, Catholics were legally unable to inherit or purchase land, were forbidden from sending their children abroad to be educated as Catholics, and, bizarrely, were not allowed to keep a horse worth more than ten pounds. Alexander Pope was, therefore, very profoundly shaped by the discrimination his family faced because of their religion.

The result was, according to Young, that he became “very profoundly a poet of opposition … Far from being the laureate of Augustan England, Pope was a firm witness to the perceived shortcomings of the Whig alliance between Church and State.” This doesn’t mean that he was an orthodox Catholic: in fact he had “a problematic relationship with religion” and distanced himself  “from much of the religious debate that engulfed a lifetime deeply marked and shadowed by the politics of religion”.

It is perhaps no surprise then that An Essay on Man, which is the poem most likely still to be studied in schools, “contains both Catholic theology and elements of freethinking”. We might argue about the balance of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the poem but what is clear is that the poem certainly doesn’t contain “anything like a consistently or straightforwardly Christian exercise in apologetics.”

So what do we get in Pope’s poetry? Young quotes two particularly significant passages. The first is from one of his Imitations of Horace:

           

            My Head and Heart thus flowing thro’ my Quill,

            Verse-man or Prose-man, term me what you will,

            Papist or Protestant, or both between,

            Like good Erasmus in an honest Mean,

            In Moderation placing all my Glory,

            While Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory.

To a certain extent, in other words, Pope was a mere Christian, but a typically moderate Augustan one. However, there is another passage which suggests that Pope wasn’t simply a moderate:

            Hopes after Hopes of pious Papists fail’d,

            While mighty WILLIAM’s thundering Arm prevail’d.

            For Right Hereditary tax’d and fin’d,

            He [Pope’s father] stuck to Poverty with Peace of Mind;

            And me, the Muses help’d to undergo it;

            Convict a Papist He, and I a Poet.

Young identifies “a secularizing drift from religion to poetry as a means of ideological resistance” in Pope's work. As has been suggested many times before, this same secularizing drift from religion to literature is commonly met in 20th Century literary texts. Pope is rarely taught in schools these days but in many ways he is a very familiar modern figure.

However, we can perhaps overdo this emphasis on Pope's secularizing drift. Young also recognises that “Pope’s use of satire in disguising his own commitments … makes it occasionally difficult to disentangle the religious elements of his thinking”. Indeed, he professes himself unable to explain why Pope remained a Catholic: “Why Pope, whose religious character remains obscure, chose to remain a Roman Catholic when conversion to Anglicanism would have procured him an altogether easier and more comfortable political identity,” he writes, “is a genuine enigma.”

There is one obvious answer, though it’s not an answer one normally finds in academic textbooks. Just possibly, as G.K. Chesterton once suggested in another context, the great fisherman “caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”  

Learning from the French (and a couple of Americans)

I recently picked up a battered secondhand copy of French Literature and its Background: the Twentieth Century, which contains, among many other interesting chapters, an essay on 'The Novel and Christian Belief' by the book's editor, John Cruickshank.


Cruickshank, who was Professor of French at the University of Sussex, argued that François Mauriac,  Georges Bernanos, and Julien Green "all managed to command a wide readership while producing a considerable body of work in which they have written consciously as Catholics." Even if they hadn't influenced various English writers (Graham Greene most notably) they would still be of considerable interest in their own right.


The "avoidance of naive religious didacticism, notable in Mauriac' best work as well as in the novels of Bernanos and Green, goes some way towards explaining the considerable appeal of all three to a largely secular-minded public. They are not concerned to illustrate religious dogmas but to respond to their faith in imaginative and human terms," according to Cruickshank.


So which novels are particularly worth reading? I'll post some reviews another time but here are the ones Cruickshank recommends.


Among Mauriac's "more orthodox, charitable, and explicitly Christian novels of his 'second period'", he praises The Knot of Vipers and The Woman of the Pharisees. (I'm giving the English titles though he gives the original French ones.)


"In some ways, Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette is Bernanos's most satisfactory artistic achievement with its deeply compassionate account of an unloved, and superficially unlovable, child. The religious significance is implied rather than stated positively, yet implied with both delicacy and boldness, as the suffering of a fourteen-year-old girl points to Christ's passion," according to Cruickshank. However, he also recommends The Diary of a Country Priest and Monsieur Ouine.


As for Julien Green: "The main novels written by Green the believer are Moïra (1950) and Chaque homme dans sa nuit (1960)."


So we can learn from the French but what about the Americans? Well, Cruickshank's comments about Bernanos's use of 'Realism' to mean "responsiveness to the life of the spirit as well as of the flesh", a responsiveness which "must encompass both the seen and unseen worlds" reminds me of Flannery O'Connor's claim that, “All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality.” ('The Grotesque in Southern Fiction')


And the other American? Julien Green himself. One of the greatest writers in French in the Twentieth Century was actually an American citizen.

An Introduction to English Poetry

James Fenton’s An Introduction to English Poetry is an interesting book, though I cannot wholeheartedly recommend it. For a start the title is quite misleading: this is a book about the structure of poetry rather than a book about English poetry per se. Now a book about structure is just what some students need so the misleading title shouldn’t bother us too much. However, much more disturbing for the Catholic English teacher is the artificial time constraint Fenton places upon himself. In his first chapter on ‘The History and Scope of English Poetry’ he is quite open about the fact that English poetry, or at least English poetry as discussed in his book, began in c1500. 

There are, as he explains, all sorts of good, practical reasons for limiting his book to the last 500 years of English poetry but surely there are big problems too in ignoring the first thousand years of English poetry, a millennium when, incidentally, England was, for the most part, solidly Catholic. Pope Benedict was not thinking of English poetry when he spoke about a hermeneutic of continuity but his insights can certainly applied to the world of English Literature. It’s easy to ignore this country’s greatest Catholic poetry if you start your analysis at the time of the Reformation.

Not that James Fenton can ignore the pre-Reformation world altogether. He rightly reminds us that “Poetry carries its history within it” but, having considered and then rejected Chaucer (pp.1-2), he is later forced to acknowledge his influence on W.H. Auden (p.68). The way Auden was influenced by Elizabethan poetry is analysed (p.4) but the influence of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse on his work is ignored completely. Surely this is a peculiarly lopsided analysis.

Pre-Reformation poetry (my phrase: not his) is not considered in Fenton’s book essentially on the grounds of incomprehensibility but even here Fenton ties himself in knots by arguing that “the really striking thing about, say, the recent film of Romeo and Juliet is the effectiveness with which the poetry communicates, and does so when delivered at great speed. Leonardo DiCaprio did not slow down in order to get a complex point across. He simply made sure that he understood the point and assumed that his understanding would be enough to carry the audience with him.” Absolutely right but why should this argument apply to Shakespeare and not to other great authors from earlier centuries?

I am not arguing that Fenton is consciously anti-Catholic – far from it – but it surely is the case that our choice of poets shapes our whole understanding of the shape and scope of English poetry. And James Fenton’s choices are, at best, idiosyncratic: John Fuller gets four mentions while Dryden, Hopkins and Wordsworth don’t get that many between them.

There is much that’s worth reading in this book - I shall be recommending the glossary and chapters 5 and 6 (on iambic pentameter), 14 (on the longer stanza: irritatingly, the chapter on the shorter stanza is much less useful), 15 (the sonnet), and 20 (writing for the eye) to my students - but reader beware: there is much that is missing too. 

Doing God in Education

Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's Director of Communications and Strategy, once famously said that the Blair Government didn't "do God". Well, times are now a-changing and we're hearing plenty about "doing God".

Michael Gove, the current Secretary of State for Education, has written an interesting article in this week's Catholic Herald, for instance, while the latest report from Theos, the public theology think tank, is entitled 'Doing God in Education'. I don't agree with everything either Michael Gove or Trevor Cooling, the author of the Theos report, have to say but certainly some of what they argue could usefully be applied to the teaching of English in Catholic schools. At least the debate has now started.

Guess the poet

So which poet do you think wrote this poem?

Mother, whose virgin bosom was uncrost

With the least shade of thought to sin allied;

Woman, above all women glorified,

Our tainted nature's solitary boast;

Purer than foam on central ocean tost; 

Brighter than eastern skies at daybreak strewn

With fancied roses, than the unblemished moon

Before her wane begins on heaven's blue coast;

Thy image falls to earth.

                                       Yet some, I ween,

Not unforgiven the suppliant knee might bend

As to a visible power, in which did blend

All that was mixed and reconciled in thee

Of mother's love with maiden purity,

Of high with low celestial with terrene.

Yep, it was William Wordsworth. Congratulations if you recognised one of his 'Ecclesiastical Sonnets'. To see some more poems addressed to Our Lady by the most unexpected of poets, ranging from John Milton to Lord Byron, from John Donne to Thom Gunn, see In Praise of Our Lady, edited by Elizabeth Jennings.  

Susanna Tamaro - Il Grande Albero

The award-winning, best-selling, Italian Catholic author, Susanna Tamaro, (whose official website, in Italian, can be found here) recently published what looks like a charming fable about a great tree, Il Grande Albero, in which Pope John Paul II has a cameo role.

To hear a news report about the book click here and to hear Susanna Tamaro discussing it in Italian (but with English subtitles) click here.

It's available as an App but it's not yet available in English translation. Any translators out there? Any English language publishers?

Les Murray

I can't quite make up my mind about Les Murray. As a Catholic poet who could well be in with a chance of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, he certainly can't be ignored.

You can read a number of his poems here; there's an interesting interview, in which he talks about his faith (among many other things), here; there's a review from Standpoint here and a profile from the Guardian here.

Although I like Murray's emphasis on what he calls "presence", I am not quite convinced by some of his bolder claims. 'Distinguo', for example, is a fascinating poem but is it really true that prose is protestant-agnostic and poetry Catholic? And what do we make of (the last stanza in particular) of this poem? Murray routinely dedicates his books "to the glory of God" but don't turn to his poetry if it's the Australian equivalent of Hymns Ancient and Modern that you're after.

Poem of the Week

I have a Poem of the Week in my classroom and normally I put pretty accessible stuff on display. However I also try to widen my students' poetic range, so this week I've gone for one of the earliest poems in the English language and the first by a poet whose name we know. You can read more about Caedmon and his poem here and you can hear the poem (in Old English) by clicking here.

Poems like this remind us that, as G.K. Chesterton put it, "English literature was English a long time before it was Protestant" but they also give us a useful way into discussions about so-called regional literature, rhythm and structure. Caedmon's poem also reminds us that, far from inventing Middle-earth, Tolkien tapped into a rich and largely forgotten tradition of (Catholic) English literature.

Caedmon's Hymn: Northumbrian Version

Verse Early Anglian

Nu scylun hergan         hefaenricaes uard,
metudæs maecti         end his modgidanc,
uerc uuldurfadur,         sue he uundra gihuaes,
eci dryctin,         or astelidæ.

He aerist scop         aelda barnum

heben til hrofe,         haleg scepen;
tha middungeard         moncynnæs uard,
eci dryctin,         æfter tiadæ
firum foldu,         frea allmectig.

Caedmon's Hymn: West Saxon Version

Verse Early Saxon

Nu sculon herigean         heofonrices weard,
meotodes meahte         and his modgeþanc,
weorc wuldorfæder,         swa he wundra gehwæs,
ece drihten,         or onstealde.

He ærest sceop         eorðan bearnum
heofon to hrofe,         halig scyppend;
þa middangeard         moncynnes weard,
ece drihten,         æfter teode
firum foldan,         frea ælmihtig.

Cædmon's Hymn

Now let me praise the keeper of Heaven's kingdom,

the might of the Creator, and his thought,

the work of the Father of glory, how each of wonders

the Eternal Lord established in the beginning.

He first created for the sons of men

Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator,

then Middle-earth the keeper of mankind,

the Eternal Lord, afterwards made,

the earth for men, the Almighty Lord.

          In the beginning Cædmon sang this poem.

Model United Nations

I have just returned from a Model United Nations conference with some of my students and was delighted to see that the Holy See was represented. It is easy for the Catholic voice to be ignored entirely and so having the Holy See as one representative among many at such conferences is very welcome. 


The presence of the Holy See at the UN upsets some but it's important to remember that, as the official website of the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations puts it, "The Holy See enjoys by its own choice the status of Permanent Observer at the United Nations, rather than of a full Member." The Vatican is not muscling in on the international community; on the contrary, it does not insist on what might be regarded as its right to full membership.


To find out more about the Holy See and the UN click here. To read Pope Benedict's speech to the General Assembly of the UN in 2008 click here and to read the Vatican's views about reform of the UN (from 2004) click here. 

Tolkien's Ring of Words

Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary is a fascinating and beautifully produced book which deserves a place in any school library. To hear the authors talking about their book and, more widely, about Tolkien's lexicographical research and its impact on his writing click here or follow the links at Oxford University's list of podcasts.

Unfortunately, Tolkien's strong Catholic beliefs only get a passing, and slightly disparaging, mention in the entry about waybread or lembas: "Spiritually minded etymologists," the authors inform us, "might also discern here a scholarly link with the word viaticum. In Roman Catholic practice, this is the consecrated bread of the Eucharist administered to someone who is dying or in danger of death." 

They do, to be fair, finish with a more balanced set of comments: "Tolkien acknowledged the comparison between lembas and the Eucharist as miraculously sustaining forms of bread: the waybread provides food for Frodo and Sam on a journey that, to the best of their knowledge, leads to death. He comments that 'far greater things may colour the mind in dealing with lesser things of a fairy-story' (Lett. 213 25 October 1958)."

However, The Ring of Words takes us only so far. We need to look elsewhere if we are to discover what Tolkien believed about the Eucharist and, therefore, what he was doing in creating lembas in The Lord of the Rings.

Part of the answer is given in a fascinating paragraph, only part of which (sadly) is given in Humphrey Carpenter's collection of Tolkien's letters : "Out of the darkness of my life," Tolkien wrote to his son, Michael, in 1941, "so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament..... There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man's heart desires."

'A Whispered Name'

Last November I briefly mentioned William Brodrick's A Whispered Name. Follow the link to see an interview with the author or read on for a more detailed review, which will also shortly appear at www.catholicfiction.net:

William Brodrick’s Father Anselm novels are very welcome additions to the literary canon. There are many fine novels about World War I but, in A Whispered Name, Brodrick gives us something new: a compelling mystery about a First World War deserter and his mysterious links with an officer who went on to become a priest and monk.

Brodrick’s Father Anselm, who finally uncovers the mystery, is the latest in a long line of priest-detectives. What makes this novel different is the detailed knowledge Brodrick, a barrister and former Augustinian friar, brings to his writing. He creates, in Larkwood monastery, an entirely believable monastic community and fills it with psychologically credible individuals.

He also creates a genuinely intriguing, if slow-moving, plot. A chance meeting with an elderly man and his daughter in Larkwood monastery’s cemetery forces Anselm into carrying out an investigation into the story behind the apparent execution of a young Irish soldier for desertion during the slaughter of Passchaendale in 1917. What he discovers – without wishing to give too much of the plot away – is a complex and intriguing tale of courage behind a veneer of straightforward military cowardice.

A Whispered Name – the title is taken from a Sassoon poem – is both a well-plotted crime novel and a powerful reconstruction of some of the worst days of that terrible war. It won the 2009 Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award but it is a literary rather than a popular novel. Brodrick writes well and gets his legal and military details right; however, what really makes the book are the rounded characters. A Whispered Name is no page-turner but it is a gripping and powerful account of ordinary people in extraordinarily difficult times.

I did find myself wondering for much of the book what difference it made having a monk as investigator but, by the end of the novel, I was convinced. What starts off as a war novel and a murder mystery of sorts becomes a profound meditation on faith and life. After 300 pages, many military horrors, and a few clever twists, we are left thinking not just about the horrors of war but also about the possibility of redemption.