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Gay curate Blair Ashley is a former lover of recently deceased AIDS sufferer Julian Blaikie, parishioner and aristocrat whose Lady Bracknell-esque mother is aggressively unsympathetic. Then there's Lyndon Brooks, infatuated adolescent worshipper, Esther the bishop's wife, who discovers her true lesbian self at age 53, and a pair of women who are married in church by the curate without the knowledge of the vicar--himself happily married but beset by religious doubts. And there are more, including an HIV- positive doctor, a positive librarian and a fiercely "celibate" archdeacon who explores his perversions with a rent boy at the private altar in his cellar.
But graphic homo-erotic sex and the counterpointing of it against the homophobia of the bishop and others notwithstanding, Easter is also a novel about spirituality, suffering and the succouring role of liturgical church services, all meticulously described. Just as it would have been in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, the whole of the human experience is in Easterincluding faith, scepticism, cynicism, honesty, despair, cruelty, snobbery, guilt and corruption.
The account of Trudy England, closet childhood Jewish German refugee who at last finds "peace in herself", is very moving indeed. So is the depiction of the Nigerian Child, Cherish, another refugee, blind and dying of AIDS.
Arditti, who structures his novel in three sections--the last being a working of the events of the first from different angles--often writes with wittily shrewd and observant precision. Someone speaks with "tweed-skirted diction"; a dying man watches the words of a prayer "fly about the room like humming-birds"; and the bishop's PA tartly initiates a visitor into canon biscuit law--"Chocolates are for suffragans, bourbons for archdeacons. Vicars and curates get rich tea". --Susan Elkin --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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The Curate straightens his alb, kisses his stole and strides out to meet the donkey. Read the first page
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I needn't have worried. Easter is a wonderful book - it's funny, it's moving, it's sexy and it's profound. Whole chunks of the book take place in church services, but don't be put off. If only all church services were as dramatic (and well-written!) as this, the Church wouldn't be worrying about falling numbers. A whole range of fascinating characters - the local grande dame and her downtrodden companion, a corrupt property developer and his bitchy wife, an Austrian Jewish refugee, a lesbian painter and her New Zealand girlfriend, a North Country librarian with HIV, an African princess from Nigeria (my favourite character), not forgetting the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh bickering on the way to Westminster Abbey - are brilliantly interwoven in a range of Easter stories. What's more, at the centre Arditti has put the challenging story of a modern Jesus - the curate, Blair (no, not that one!).
What makes the book especially fascinating is the way Arditti has used a highly original structure - looking at the same events through different perspectives - and yet the novel is a compulsive page-turner. Easter makes you laugh and cry and it makes you think. I'd recommend it to everyone. It's the best new novel I've read for years.
I got somewhat irritated by the schematic and very politically correct classification of characters. Most of the good parts are reserved for homosexual and HIV-positive characters with alternative life styles, and the people with more conventional roles or beliefs come off rather badly. The book includes wild charicatures of an evangelical bishop and a repressed homosexual Anglo-Catholic Archdeacon indulging in bizarre masochistic practices.
If you're not turned off by the rather one-sided ideological viewpoint, you'll find this book an interesting, serious exploration of religious themes in modern life. I enjoyed it.
Arditti is without doubt a skillful writer, particulary with dialogue, and is so good at describing the challenges and apparent contradictions of living a Christian (C of E style) life in a society where congregations are dwindling, that this is almost two books in one.
I personally could have done with less graphic descriptions of a Curate's search for sexual liberation on Hampstead Heath at night, and more with the author's insight into Christianity and the C of E.
Strangely- although this may of course be the author's intent- some of the less appealing characters (for example "Ted Bishop" the Bishop of London) come over as quite genuine albeit misguided.Hard to know what characters we are expected to approve of and the converse. The "hero" appears to be the Gay Curate with AIDS who attempts to define his faith in terms of his sexual mores and condition. Only Arditti can answer this one.
Nevertheless, thought provoking and worth reading
'Michael Arditti's Easter is a revelation. It's no more a book for one season than Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Read more
'Michael Arditti's Easter is a revelation. It's no more a book for one season than Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Read more
The novel is in three sections. Read more
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