A Son of the Rock

Faber, 2007

Is it possible to review a book without regard to its content? To treat only of its literary merits – the prose, the characterisation, the plot – and not their ramifications? If so, then Be Near Me is a fine novel, well written. The prose is fluid and consciously literary, if a little over florid in a few places, and the characters are well enough observed.

A more or less English Catholic Priest, David Anderton, comes to a small Ayrshire parish where he is regarded with suspicion as an incomer. Only his part-time housekeeper, Mrs Poole, and two fifteen year old parishioners called Mark and Lisa make any effort to see him as an individual and not an interloper. The remainder of the book, interspersed with flashbacks of Anderton’s childhood and his life as a student, when he had a boyfriend who died in a car crash, an event which precipitated his retreat into the priesthood, deals with the unravelling of these latter relationships.

I may be wearing my teacher’s hat here but from its inception Anderton’s relationship with the teenagers was ill-advised and implied trouble. His response to the views they express – and the language they used – on their first meeting during a school lesson was inadequate at best, diffident and lacking in the moral guidance you might expect from an educator – or a cleric.

O’Hagan intends this of course. Anderton’s confused and ineffective response in this early encounter is emblematic of his attitude to his ministry and to the crisis that later engulfs him. He seems lost and insecure, but wilfully – and frustratingly – so. As a portrait of a man unable to prevent, indeed intent on, his own ignominy Be Near Me is exemplary.

This review could finish here were it not for the caveat expressed in its first sentence. Potential readers of the novel unwilling to have their reactions possibly prejudiced should also stop here.

THERE IS A MAJOR PLOT SPOILER IN WHAT FOLLOWS.

As O’Hagan has reservations about the treatment of Roman Catholicism’s adherents in Scotland – which admittedly not all of his co-denominationalists necessarily share – I hesitate to write this; but I found his subject matter troubling. Or, rather, the way in which it was approached.

He has Anderton remember his school at Ampleforth and mention tales of abuse by the Brothers but say he neither witnessed nor suffered any himself. Is there a hint of disingenuousness here; is this too dismissive of the issue?

Later Anderton reveals himself as guilty of what is essentially a sexual assault (even if a minor one) on Mark. That his “victim” is nearly of the age of consent and that the act was not followed through neither excuses nor expiates it.

Yes, Be Near Me has things to say about jumping to conclusions, mob rule and vigilantism, the tabloid tendency to simplify complex matters and the failure of an adversarial justice system to penetrate to the truth of things.

But it comes close to implying that such abuse didn’t happen or, if it did, was relatively inconsequential; misunderstood even.

I am not saying that one ought not to write about paedophiles, nor that they may not be considered sympathetically in fiction, only that, if they are, it should be with due care and attention to their victims and to its seriousness; and in this I think O’Hagan fails, which is an extremely severe defect. In his choice of narrator and in the age of that character’s “victim” O’Hagan seems to be skating round the issue rather than confronting it. Minimising it, if you will. And is that not reprehensible?

Notwithstanding this objection, however, whatever else Be Near Me does as a novel, it made me reflect on these matters. And, in the end, to promote such reflections is one of serious fiction’s functions.