NOVEL OF THE WEEK Hoping for miracles Jubilate
Michael Arditti
ARCADIA BOOKS, 339PP, £11.99 ■Tablet bookshop price £10.80
ichard is an adult reduced to fitful moronic charm by a brain haemorrhage. He wanders artlessly across the departure lounge at Stansted into the changing room at Accessorize and molests a woman trying on a blouse. “We’re taking a group of sick people to Lourdes,” the pilgrimage director explains to a shocked security guard. While Richard’s snooty mother, Patricia, a regular helper on the annual pilgrimage, dismisses the fuss, his faithful and long-suffering wife, Gillian, hurries to smooth things out. This is her first trip to Lourdes, and she is candid in hoping for a miracle. Also milling around the airport is a film crew, genial but detached, making a documentary to mark the 150th anniversary of the “so-called Virgin Mary’s so-called apparitions” to Bernadette Soubirous. The film’s director is the smooth-talking Vincent. Vincent is an unbeliever. “No bet-hedging agnosticism here,” he assures Gillian. Lapsed boozer and womaniser as well as lapsed Barnsley Catholic, Vincent is racked with guilt over his complicity in the accidental death of his only child and the subsequent crash of his marriage. Craving affirmation and healing as much as any of the malades who come to ask St Bernadette to pray for them, the faithful Gillian and the faithless Vincent hurtle unstoppably towards an amour fou. Where will it end? Jubilate is a wily and accomplished novel
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that explores the contested ground between human love and divine love. In the end, there is no “Julia Flyte moment”, where a character turns away from a forbidden love and “takes up her cross”. Even a novelist with Waugh’s genius struggled to make the Catholic family in Brideshead Revisited seem quite right in the head. In Jubilate, there is an absolution, and happiness and holiness make their peace. Perhaps only Catholic readers of a certain age will be haunted by the thought that God may be more jealous than enlightened, compassionate people suppose. Arditti expertly switches the narrative voice between Gillian and Vincent, shuffles the time lines backwards and forwards, and proffers and withholds just enough information to move the story along while keeping the reader’s tongue wagging. And it seems to me that Arditti, surely a regular visitor himself, really “gets” Lourdes, the tawdry excesses, the wise-cracking priests, the brink-of-chaos logistics, the last-shall-be-first fuzzy logic – human beings at their most strange and hopeful and wonderful. Brendan Walsh
Tel 01420 592974
POPE BENEDICT X VI
JESUS OFNAZARETH – HOLY WEEK –
From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection
£14.95
ISBN 978-1-86082-707-5 (CTS code: Do840) 384 pages
20.3 cm (h) x 13.3 cm (w) hardback, dust jacket
PUBLICATION DATE: 10TH MARCH 2011
WWW.CTS-ONLINE.ORG.UK
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www.cts-online.org.uk 12 March 2011 | THE TABLET | 27 Volume Two
of the International Bestseller
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