Is faith a sexually transmitted disease? The question arises as Michael Arditti tells the story of Gillian, a childless middle-aged woman on a pilgrimage to Lourdes with her brain-damaged husband and her forbidding mother-in-law Patricia. She meets Vincent, a divorced ex-Catholic TV director whose daughter died. Soon after their encounter they start a passionate affair, counterpointed with arguments about the foundations of spiritual belief, the nature of suffering and marriage and the possibility of miracles. The narrative comes from both characters in alternate chapters.
The descriptions of Lourdes are deftly done. We meet a variety of priests with their hallowed jokes, and a convincing collection of pilgrims. There are also sceptics, such as teenage Kevin who reads Rimbaud and sneers at shops full of kitsch, or Tadeusz, who loves his wife but not the church. We aren’t spared the impatience, inattention or even impiety of the devout. The real problem is with the protagonists — and not just the heavy-footed farce of Vincent’s search for condoms or Patricia’s implausible last-minute character makeover. Arditti has pushed the moral balance down with his thumb.
When Vincent and Gillian briefly touch at the end of the first celebratory mass, he is overwhelmed by an extraordinary “peace that inflames every nerve in my body”, while she is “filled with lightness and light”. This inflated rhetoric is matched by forced religious symbolism — to Gillian, Vincent’s breath is “fresh as the wine at Cana”, while a snake stumbled on during a mountain excursion seems to be there to support Vincent’s assertion that “we will be Adam and Eve”. Gillian sounds especially unconvincing as she veers between erotic hyperbole and the dullest of clichés — “verdant slopes” and “glorious vista”. Jubilate means rejoice, but it’s hard to celebrate the book with more than a half-hearted hosanna.