Refiner’s Fire: Real People Struggle with Evil

Piers Paul Read’s characters are not all squeezed into a predictable mold.

In his essay After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934), T. S. Eliot observed: “… with the disappearance of the idea of intense moral struggle, the human beings presented to us both in poetry and in prose fiction today … tend to become less and less real. It is in fact in moments of moral and spiritual struggle depending upon spiritual sanctions … that men and women come nearest to being real.”

Eliot would have found the characters of Piers Paul Read, the English Catholic novelist, to be an important exception to the trend he lamented. As one reviewer notes, Read writes about “decent, well-intentioned people who suddenly find themselves up to their lily-white necks in evil.” And he writes well indeed. The New York Times Book Review has compared him to Tolstoy and said he is one of Britain’s “most intelligent and disturbing writers.” He has also been compared to another English Catholic, Graham Greene, although even Greene cannot equal the psychological density of his characterization and the arresting quality of his story lines.

Read is a social novelist, a realist, but unlike some other writers of this type he is no mere determinist, and his characters are not hopelessly enmeshed in some hapless weave of circumstance and fate. While finding themselves up to their necks in evil, his characters also possess the power to choose another future. A case could be made that Read takes human freedom as seriously as any novelist since Dostoevsky, and so repentance is always a possibility in his world. In novels such as Monk Dawson, A Married Man, The Upstart, The Professor’s Daughter, and The Villa Golitsyn, the reader knows it is possible for Read’s protagonists to “open their eyes,” in the words of Acts, and “to turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God.”

Monk Dawson, for example, is about a Roman Catholic priest who abandons his vocation because of religious doubts. He becomes a fashionable journalist in London and writes an article about why people no longer need religion. He takes up with a smart set and carries on with a beautiful young widow. She eventually throws him over and on the rebound he marries someone else. She works hard at the marriage, Dawson does not. Finally, in desperation, she takes her life. It is only then that the most interesting chapter in Dawson’s life comes to be written.

Karl Menninger writes that a suffering conscience can bring about an experience of repentance that leads to a higher level of life. This is what happens to Dawson. He reenters the church, a Trappist monastery, not for comfort or out of weakness, but because he learns a new truth: the conscience cannot be destroyed. The experience Read depicts here is as old as Christian faith itself. Its prototype is Peter’s breakdown after his denial of Christ. Peter’s tears were an opportunity for God to begin in him a ministry that would be fruitful because at last he could fathom his utter dependence on God. So, too, Dawson discovers that one “does not attain a state of grace through a continuous succession of right actions, but by the understanding of the contradictions within oneself, a containment of them, and hence the preservation of one’s moral integrity. Sin was inevitable, but there was an antidote in repentance.”

Not all of Read’s characters choose to repent, however. His most recent novel, The Villa Golitsyn, is about two men who were together in school and then in the Foreign Office. Ludley has left the FO, ostensibly to look after his family business, but now the FO has reason to think he passed along secrets to the Asian Communists. Milson is sent to visit him, win his confidence, and extract a confession. We learn, too, that Ludlow has an even more shocking secret.

At one point Milson thinks his old friend is on the verge of confessing. Urging him on, he says: “One can always confess a sin.” But Ludlow only coughs and laughs.

“No, dear boy,” he says. “I can’t confess because I can’t repent, and I can’t repent because I’m not sorry. That is what leads to despair. To feel acute remorse yet know that one would do what one did all over again.”

Since moral freedom figures so prominently in his books, Read gets around a criticism frequently aimed at religious novelists. John Gardner, for example, criticized John Updike’s novels for being too much like sermons. He wrote: “No man can serve two masters, the artistic ideal, which makes its premise an essential and radical openness to persuasion, and the religious ideal … which is ‘deaf even to the best counterarguments’ (On Moral Fiction).” This is true for some religious writers. Spotting their religious premises, the reader quickly gathers what their conclusions will be and has the unpleasant experience of watching characters squeezed into the mold of some inevitable outcome.

But Read, on the other hand, gives us characters who are full of ambiguities and contradictions, and because freedom is real in his artistic universe, their course is unpredictable and “open to persuasion.” It is Read’s great distinction that his theology, instead of flattening his characters, illumines them by revealing their struggles to be what they are, in Eliot’s words, “moments of moral and spiritual struggle depending upon spiritual sanctions.”

Mr. Bachelder is minister of the First Congregational Church in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, and the author of Mystery and Miracle (C.S.S., 1982).

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