Be Near Me

Be Near Me
By Andrew O'Hagan
Faber, 278pp, $29.95

SOMETHING is eating away at Father David Anderton, the narrator of Be Near Me, a novel as beautiful and perfectly pitched as its title. An English priest working in the Scottish parish of Dalgarnock, he is afflicted by "a large private sense of wanting to depart from the person I had always been".

Not his faith but his willingness to evangelise has vanished, and all that remains is his propensity to favour the workings of private taste over public rallying cries. He hates bigotry and small-mindedness and believes in improving the mind; he despises the atmosphere at the local school where "education is a matter of bitter entrenchment as opposed to any sort of managed revelation".

Along comes Mark McNulty, a teenage delinquent who possesses "the kind of sharp and brutal honesty that passes for charm in some people". He spells trouble. He cares little for anything. But he is beautiful to look at and he knows "how to insinuate himself into people's worries about themselves". He and his friend Lisa become part of Father Anderton's life, turning up on his doorstep in the middle of the night, daring him to turn them away. They seem beguiled by his refusal to scold them, perhaps also by his low-key concern for them, and so a rapport is established.

Father Anderton may be an aesthete surrounded by vulgarity but he is no Humbert Humbert. Andrew O'Hagan invites the comparison with a little Nabokovian passage about dead butterflies. But his character is a lower, more likable order of sensualist, more self-conscious and self-critical than Humbert.

Long ago, as a Vietnam-era student, he even flirted with political activism, something that would never have occurred to Humbert or Nabokov. Still, one night Father Anderton does what no priest ought to.

[...] 

It's hard to imagine a better, more beautiful novel being published this year. I will certainly be reading it again.

Sebastian Smee is The Australian's national art critic.