Be Near Me
By Andrew O’Hagan
Harcourt, 305 pages, $24
In the wake of the appalling revelations about the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, it is a very brave writer who would dare to make the narrator-hero of his novel a gay priest accused of pedophilia, and moreover to conceive of that hero as a kind of martyr. Yet that is what much-heralded Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan has done in “Be Near Me,” a novel of great beauty as well as one with a deep understanding of religious faith, sexual longing and the truly sordid public, as opposed to private, passions that frequently debase contemporary life.
“It’s hard to tell the difference between press people and ordinary people,” the accused priest observes on his way to court, “they have a similar avarice for the drama of wasted lives.”
O’Hagan’s troubled protagonist is Rev. David Anderton, a priest from an old English Catholic family who is pastor of a nondescript church outside of Glasgow. As chaplain to the local Catholic school, he befriends a group of its least-promising students. Lazy, cruel, profane, the teenagers hope to shock and offend Anderton while nevertheless exploiting his good will.
O’Hagan’s ear for the street slang of Scottish teenagers is pitch perfect, and you wince for the priest as he tries to fend off the expletive-filled banter of his cagey young charges. An Oxford University graduate initially educated by Benedictine monks, Anderton is something of an aesthete and clearly an outsider in this culturally and economically marginal place.
As an Englishman in Scotland, he is also suspect, even by his own parishioners and fellow priests. Why he is drawn to the irksome students, and especially to their handsome and charismatic leader, Mark, is not immediately clear. What is clear is that the middle-age priest’s indulgence of, and eventual participation in, the antics of the teenagers is symptomatic of his own despair. In retrospect he writes:
“Each man has his own way of betraying himself. For so long I had known myself only in prayers, in silent shadows and in dreams. Say I was longing for disaster.”
The story of Anderton’s fateful, drunken encounter with Mark is deftly framed first by the narrator’s memories of his youth and family, and then his halcyon days at Oxford. Some of this is a kind of gloss on Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited,” considered by many to be the archetypal English Catholic novel.
In both books, a youthful homosexual infatuation comes to be understood as a first and necessary step in the religious vocations of the principal characters. “No one is ever holy without suffering,” is how sanctity is characterized in Brideshead. O’Hagan seems to have taken that principle to heart, for Anderton is indeed tested and purified by his ordeal. As he tells his skeptical mother, ” ‘You won’t like me for saying this, but I believe God is present in all this too.’ “
Novels are built sentence by sentence, and O’Hagan is a sentencemaker of rare skill. Of one of Anderton’s more belligerent parishioners he writes, “He liked to cast a cold eye on the present, though he, in fact, was the present, the coldness beholding itself.” O’Hagan is also witty, with a keen eye for every social resentment and betrayal. A tense dinner party Anderton hosts for his bishop, “where ambition and obligation tinkled with such menace among the bottles,” and the masterly unfolding of the priest’s trial, are especially satisfying in this regard.
The word “martyr” is derived from the Greek word for “witness,” which is exactly what Anderton is, in the religious and legal senses of the word. Against the advice of his lawyer, Anderton insists on telling the truth. The truth, as usual, is complicated, although Anderton has no wish to be exonerated. As in the classic Christian stories of martyrdom, we have a sense that the priest’s humiliation and suffering have redeemed him, even if they have deprived him of his vocation and good name.
Do not think this is in any sense a pious or didactic story. It is, rather, an astonishing journey into one man’s soul.
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Paul Baumann is the editor of Commonweal.
