Fiction: Andrew O'Hagan is no mere teller of tales. He is a state-of-the-nation novelist and a front-ranking one at that - though still only in his 30s. Both his previous novels, Our Fathers, shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize, and Performance, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, offer unparalleled insights into the forces that can diminish, debase and often destroy ordinary lives in contemporary society.
His latest novel, Be Near Me, narrated by middle-aged Catholic priest Fr David Anderton, more than adequately lives up to the expectations created by these two works.
Fr David's fortunes, or rather misfortunes, in the small parish of Dalgarnock, to which he has been newly appointed, are deftly deployed to explore the dilemma of pursuing private needs while meeting public and professional expectations. In addition, these same misfortunes serve to form the basis of a portrait not just of a bigoted small town wracked by age-old hostilities, but of a nation foundering in the struggle to hammer out an identity in post-industrial Britain. O'Hagan presents this struggle as taking place on many fronts, but its most sustained and in-depth depiction is built around Fr David's ill-fated involvement with local youths Mark McNulty and Lisa Nolan.
Through institutions such as family, church and football club the lives of the people of Dalgarnock seem closely interconnected but at a more significant level are revealed to be dangerously remote from each other. Men disempowered by unemployment or redeployment into silly, degrading service industries lose their footing, not just in the family hierarchy but in the larger social order. Mr McNulty is one such man. Depressed, obese and hopeless, he has long since lost whatever ability he might have had to steer his son Mark safely through adolescence. Left to his own devices Mark inevitably hooks up with others in a similar predicament. It is a familiar scenario; rudderless teenagers hanging out at the edge of an estate in which, from Fr David's perspective, there is "nothing beautiful and nothing of human history . . . just an immoderate acceptance of life's low standards and a desire for state benefits and babies". This eloquent dismissal, emanating, as it does, from a lofty world-view shaped in a diametrically opposite environment - prosperous, aesthetically conscious home, prestigious Catholic public school, then Balliol College, Oxford - typifies the distance from which Fr David looks on the lives of his parishioners. Ironically, it is this same distance, this same inability to imagine - in any real sense - the lives of those parishioners that allows him to ignore the danger of seeking to enter, on an equal footing, the emotionally chaotic, culturally arid world of these rudderless teenagers. He is not on a mission to save them. It is simply an opportunity to explore long since unexplored emotional needs, those of a neglected, youthful self lurking for decades in the wings of his sybaritic life. "Their desolation seemed greatly addictive . . ." he says, prompting him to slip away now and then from his much-loved Chopin, his claret and his freshly cut violets to dip into that desolation.
He sees their often brutal frankness as a kind of primal honesty, a point impressively exemplified by slangy, cliché-ridden dialogue in which Mark and Lisa periodically come up with an observation that cuts to the quick. Fr David, on the other hand, remains eloquent throughout, but his eloquence, rather than advancing understanding, serves only to frustrate it.
HIS ENGLISH MANNERS and all that they represent of a once confident, once effective England are, from the beginning of the novel, looked on with hostility, seen at best as an inhibiting encumbrance in Dalgarnock - itself, supposedly, a microcosm of Scottish life with its tribalism, its prejudices and its feisty pragmatism.
"That's just the sort of person you are, Father David, you think manners and conversation can get us around anything at all." This accusation is made by his ever-challenging but fundamentally very affectionate housekeeper, Mrs Poole. "You don't have any feeling for risk . . ." she says at another point, then further on, " . . . you know nothing about loyalty". In this, and indeed many other ways, Mrs Poole plays an important part in negotiating our perception of Fr David both before and after the events that undermine his place in the scheme of things. Those events, which follow a humiliating turn in his relationship with Mark, force a harsh, protracted period of self-appraisal in which his latent integrity and, more importantly, his humanity come to the fore. Until this point, Fr David is insulated in a world of haute culture, and could, in the hands of a less skilled novelist, have become something of a caricature, an arrogant, head-in-the-clouds prig. He may indeed be all of these things, but his boyish naivety, his intelligence, his enthusiasms and his belief in goodness, all meticulously developed by O'Hagan, bring him so fully to life that we feel protective of him throughout his largely self-induced ordeal and jubilant when, as a consequence, he comes to repossess some of the humanity and idealism that marked his student days in more sanguine times.
This is an intelligent, courageous novel. In a fair world it should be on Monday's Man Booker longlist.
James Ryan's most recent novel, Seeds of Doubt, was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Be Near Me By Andrew O'Hagan Faber & Faber, 278pp. £16.99