Damp squib
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Father David, an Englishman and a Catholic priest, in a small mainly protestant Scottish town, gets more than he bargained for when he befriends two local teens in a bid to relive his youth.
I'm wondering whether this Booker Prize nominee got this book published just on the strength of his nomination. Yes it's beautifully written in places, but the basics:
* Gripping storyline
* Believable characters
* Engaging sub plot
* Exciting dialogue
Just aren't there!!
The main character feels unrealistic and hollow for a man of the cloth. Great chunks of his work life are skipped or just glossed over so you don't get a sense of how his inner turmoil impacts on his work or how he relates to people in the village - key factors I'd have thought to successfully depict a priest. As a result we are left with far too much introspection with very little about what's going on outside to balance it. There are few who can pull off an engaging and rounded story written in the first person, unfortunately O'Hagan failed miserably in this case.
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A book about loneliness, love, morality, faith and despair
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David Anderson, an English priest, is sent to take over a small parish on the west coast of Scotland. But it is a very uncomfortable and uneasy setting for him and he finds his own culture and education (and pretensions) at odds with the society to which he is supposed to be ministering. He befriends a pair of teenagers from the local Catholic School and is sucked into their world, in turn fascinated and repelled by their behaviour and attitude. You soon realise that it will all end badly.......
David narrates the story but we are unsure whether he is naïve, flawed, arrogant or just plain stupid. The writing is beautiful and the author evokes strong images of both the idyllic past of David's education at Oxford and the hellishness of the small town he now finds himself in. There are some brilliant "set pieces" - such as the meal of fish and wine he prepares, his conversations with Mrs Poole and the scene in court. Towards the end it was a bit like watching a train crash - you know something awful was going to happen but you can't look away! Be Near Me is about loneliness, love, morality, faith and despair and deserved its place on the prize lists.
My one problem with the book is the difference in ages between David and the teenagers - would a man in his sixth decade really hang out with two fifteen year olds? Perhaps a smaller age gap would have been better.
I'm not sure that I've done justice to this very fine book - which certainly deserves a second reading.
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willing suspension of disbelief is impossible
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in this novel. However emotionally starved and crippled the priest may be, his fascination with fairly disgusting young people is not credible.
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Disgraced Again
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I liked J.M. Coetzee's "Disgrace" and "Be Near Me" follows a similar theme: a middle aged man commits a catastrophic error of judgement which causes him to reflect upon his life. In O'Hagan's book the man in question is Father David Anderton, a Catholic priest recently arrived in the small Ayrshire village of Dalgarnock. Father David is not a popular man. Even his staunchest defender, his housekeeper Mrs Poole says of him, "Father David is not a bad man. I don't think he knows very much about people." She is right. Father David knows about literature, Chopin and wine, but people are not his speciality. Religion is also almost an irrelevance to this man and, like the protagonists of Banville's "The Sea" and Murdoch's "The Sea, the Sea" (I'm not trying to be funny here), he is in a state of profound detachment from the world. What begins the process of his re-engagement, is his meeting a teenager, Mark McNulty, what finishes it, is a moment of redemption, when Anderton finally admits the reality of what he has done and spares Mark a brutal cross examination.
"Be Near Me" is a beautifully written description of a man so profoundly lonely that when he is trapped in his house with a mob bent on revenge crashing up the stairs, he says, "No saving grace. The only person in these moments was my oldest acquaintance - myself - waiting as usual for a creak on the stairs, the feel of the cotton against my ear drawing me back to the sound of my own blood turning." This is a man for whom the only reality is himself and a past where loss is the key note.
And this is the novel's greatest weakness. However well written the book, the sense of disengagement is pervasive and it deflected me from caring very much about David Anderton and his predicament. I cared, strangely perhaps, more for Mark's friend Lisa, whose life is so terminally restricted that going to court is as exciting as being on the telly and even more for Mark himself, both innocent and knowing, who meets Father David by chance once the trauma is past and asks the priest if he knows any soldiers, because he is going to join the Army and learn a trade.
The same is true of what the book centrally attempts to convey: it can be read as an indictment of mob politics and small town bigotry; it can be read as a critique of the emptiness of young peoples' lives (although what else can young people be but empty when they haven't actually done much living yet?); it can be read as a poetic description of a wasted life, but the strength of O'Hagan's prose is also it's weakness. The very subtlety that is so appealing when conveying detail, acts to blunt the effect of the larger messages, so I was never very sure what conclusions I should or could draw. You could say the same of "Disgrace" but its ending packs a punch while "Be Near Me" misses the mark, not by miles, but by enough for it to drop from 4 to 3 stars for me. In the end, perhaps O'Hagan fails to bring David Anderton near enough.
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Haunting
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A sad, beautifully told story that gets you in it's grip without you being quite aware of the effect and left a strong mark in my memory.
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