I’ve tried reading Michael Arditti before and, frankly, not warmed to his fiction. But I was curious about The Choice because it was handed to me by a friend who said it was a novel for intelligent, grown up people. Since she clearly thinks I fit the bill, I was part amused and part flattered. And, of course, I felt obliged to read it.
Michael Arditti is deeply interested in moral and/or religious issues and clearly knows the Church of England like the back of his hand. I am a defiant and determined recusant which is partly what has put me off his writing in the past. This wide ranging 2023 novel explores women priests, male domination, relationships between parents and children at various ages, including damaged childhoods. Abuse, incest, suicide and AIDS are in the mix too. And in the end we enter the troubled realm of whether or not you can, or should, separate art from the personality of its creator, incidentally a topic I visited here with respect to Beethoven only two weeks ago. Arditti’s scope is vast and his novel intensive. It’s much more compelling than I expected.
Clarissa Phipps is Rector of Tapley, where the church houses some religious paintings by Seward Wemlock which are highly regarded, nationally and internationally. By the end of the novel you feel as if you’ve visited and studied them minutely. Wemlock also happened to be “Lord of the Manor” although long after his death, by 2019 the Big House has been sold off. Clarissa is married to an art curator, Marcus, who doesn’t share her Christian beliefs. He has a mistress in London in an arrangement which the three of them are somehow managing for the moment, although Xan, son of Clarissa and Marcus. is a pretty troubled, truculent teenager.
An ambitious novel in every sense The Choice plays with time and narrative method. When we’re in 2019 it is told in the third person but he uses Clarissa as narrator in the central section which takes us back to 1987.
Characters have serious conversations in this novel. The discursive sections sometimes remind me of Graham Greene in, for instance, Burnt Out Case (1960) although they always feel like plot drivers and are never didactic bolt-ons.
Clarissa, a former BBC Religious Affairs producer, really does believe in what she’s doing. Now she’s ordained, she’s often conflicted. There has been a troubled relationship with her father, the Bishop who commissioned the Wemlock paintings, and who does not approve of women priests. Then there’s the terrible illness of her brother Alexander who has AIDS, graphically and moving depicted. Neither of her parents ever acknowledges the truth about their son. Denial is thematic in this novel.
What should Clarissa do when she discovers a fifteen year old boy alone in the belfry in a compromising position with an older congregant who is respected by the entire community? The decision she makes has terrible repercussions. And once you discover uncomfortable truths about an artist does showing his work in a church tacitly condone his sins? Moreover what do we mean by “sin” anyway? It’s a novel full of rather fascinating, unanswered questions.
I think, on balance, my friend is right. This is an intelligent, uncompromising novel with a serious purpose and probably not one for a long flight or the beach. It is however, a powerful story which pounds on and certainly gripped me, despite my initial misgivings. It would be an excellent choice for a book club.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The A-Z of Independent School Leadership by Guy Holloway
