Susanna Tamaro, Answer Me, 2001

A worthwhile collection of stories that explores that heavily populated border between Catholicism and atheism. There is something precarious about all the characters in these three novelettes, raised on religion yet finding themselves in long-term situations where religious faith does not help: in ‘Hell Does Not Exist’, easily the best story, an abused wife attempts to protect her young son from his violent father, and yet as a teenager the son becomes the cause of personal devastation. In ‘Answer Me’ an orphaned girl with a troubled past searches for signs that she is loved while cultivating an inner hardness that allows her to carry on, and in ‘The Burning Forest’ a widower gives an account of the unravelling of his marriage while seeking the forgiveness of his estranged daughter. I was rather taken with these stories, or rather the Stygian voice with which Tamaro relates them. They were certainly not comfortable reads – I expect for people with faith they would be even less so – and their quiet power is both startling and a little disturbing. This is fiction that doesn’t shout its atheism, just quietly points out how Christianity can indeed be either an unhelpful distraction when dealing with some life’s major problems, or even the cause of them. A dark book, and necessarily so.  PY

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Michel Faber, The Fire Gospel, 2008

The tenth in Canongate’s series on myths, this one being modelled loosely on the story of Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus and giving it to mortals, but there any proper connection to mythology ends and the satire begins. A cynical Canadian researcher in a ransacked museum in war-torn Iraq stumbles upon a hidden manuscript written by a man who knew Jesus, and a sudden lust for fame and money drives him to publish it as The Fifth Gospel, go on an American book tour and risk the wrath of Christians, Arabs, homocidal maniacs and Amazon reviewers alike. Wickedly funny for the most part, with Faber sharing exactly the kind of vicious, ascerbic humour of fellow Dutch author Cees Nooteboom. Faber must have had a very good time writing this.  PY

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Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 1960

This was Miller’s only published novel (if one discounts his incomplete Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman), and is the cornerstone of his reputation for looking at Christian themes while placing them in a science fictional context. Leibowitz was an ordinary electrician in the military prior to the world’s first nuclear war, after which, repentant, he went on to found a minor religious order. Then came the ‘Simplification’ of humanity, and six hundred years hence an indecipherable artifact is found which was undoubtedly his, and over the following thousand years man learns once again to develop nuclear weapons.

The generally bad temper to Miller’s Catholic humour is what gives A Canticle for Leibowitz its kick: he is at turns comic, often sad but always prodigiously grim and rich. Some superbly cantankerous abbots and monks (most of whom are killed off without a shred of dignity) seem to prove their human fallability on a daily basis while at the same time debate higher morality on a grand scale with perhaps too much eloquence. The final moral dilemma for Abbot Zerchi is direct, painful and graphically drawn, making Miller’s exploration – or was it a defence? – of a self-perpetuating Christianity all the more ambivalent. Part of Miller’s point seems to be that humanity’s beliefs – whether one considers them rational or irrational – will over centuries become exaggerated to the point of having a hold over us that’s often far out of proportion to their elementary simplicity; on the one hand he seems to poke fun at this state of affairs in the wider world though on the other hand he appears to stand by some of the more ornately embellished beliefs of the Catholic Church. And where this discord applies to the story’s last third it becomes an uncomfortably big question mark that hangs over everything – just how useful, or useless, is Christianity? – a question mark with a hook that one detects Miller can’t seem to wriggle off all that easily (at least on the page, and he sits the reader squarely on that fence too, allowing you to jump either way). An angry and ironic book, and there are even iconoclastic aspects that make it as relevant today as ever.  PY

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Mark Salzman, Lying Awake, 2000

Sister John, a Carmelite nun in an austere Los Angeles monastery, has over thirty years gained some notoriety for experiencing a lucid and emotional connection with God, and yet after a fall her dilemma comes when she’s diagnosed with a form of curable epilepsy: have the mystic visions been a real experience of the divine or are they in fact more pathological and explicable? Salzman performs the admirable act of giving the reader a genuinely religious perspective on Sister John’s problem, and clearly he has a clear gift for being able to 'write the other'. Believably, Sister John also has no external life with her depiction being almost entirely internal, and Salzman doesn’t attempt to answer her paradox by taking the side of either science or belief. A sensitive, delicate and quietly impressive read, and not without its edginess when the nuns are confronted with the conflicts and vagaries of the outside world.  PY

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