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Anglican Potboiler
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20678 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1992 |
4,086 Words |
| Author
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Bruce Bawer
Bruce Bawer is the author of Diminishing Fictions: Essays on
the Modern American Novel and Its Critics (Graywolf Press). He
has three books forthcoming in 1992: Prophets and Professors,
a collection of essays on modern poetry and its critics; The
Screenplay's the Thing, a compilation of pieces about films,
and Coast to Coast, a volume of poetry. |
MYSTICAL PATHS
Susan Howatch
New York: Knopf, 1992
436 pp., $23.00
The British novelist Susan Howatch began her extremely successful and prolific career in 1965. Her first eleven novels, which have heavy dramatic titles like Cashelmare, Penmarric, The Dark Shore, and The Waiting Sands, are the very model of contemporary popular fiction. Yet in Howatch's most recent novels she has abandoned the world of these early potboilers. Or has she? Known collectively as the High Church series, Howatch's last five novels (the forthcoming sixth volume is expected to be the last) are set in and around the twentieth-century Church," or Anglo-Catholic, wing most (though not all) of her clerical character belong. Are these novels popular fiction or serious literature? Is Howatch exploitative, making cheap and cynical use of the elements of her faith to produce tacky best sellers, or is she writing serious books that address the most serious theme of all?
These are not easy questions. On the one hand, Howatch's High Church novels are page-turners, as hard to put down as a bag of tortilla chips. They have been best sellers in both Great Britain and the United States; they exhibit a weakness on the author's part for flashy pop-fiction gambits (she makes one protagonist's son, for instance, not just an actor but a movie star); and they contain more than a few clichés (the movie-star son is described as having "lit up the screen"). On the other hand, their characters ponder profound metaphysical questions at length and carry on extensive debates about church liturgy and doctrine-material of a sort that popular fiction rarely goes anywhere near; and they are full of fervent, seriously engaged passages about divine love, grace, and reconciliation, passages that one can not easily imagine being written by a hack novelist.
Inside Anglicanism
In many ways, to be sure, the Anglican Church is a tailor-made setting for a hack novelist. It's got style, pageantry, a rich and colorful history (Thomas a Becket, Henry the Eighth), and the most glorious musical and liturgical heritage in Christendom. Moreover, since the queen is officially supreme head of the Church and has the power to appoint the archbishop of Canterbury and other church bigwigs (a power actually exercised, of course, by the prime minister), there is a neat political
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