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Overview
"Always trust a stranger," said David’s mother when he returned from Rome. "It’s the people you know who let you down."
Half a life later, David is Father Anderton, a Catholic priest with a small parish in Scotland. He befriends Mark and Lisa, rebellious local teenagers who live in a world he barely understands. Their company stirs memories of earlier happiness—his days at a Catholic school in Yorkshire, the student revolt in 1960s Oxford, and a choice he once made in the orange groves of Rome. But their friendship also ignites the suspicions and smoldering hatred of a town that resents strangers, and brings Father David to a reckoning with the gathered tensions of past and present.
In this masterfully written novel, Andrew O’Hagan explores the emotional and moral contradictions of religious life in a faithless age.
Synopsis
"Always trust a stranger," said David’s mother when he returned from Rome. "It’s the people you know who let you down."
Half a life later, David is Father Anderton, a Catholic priest with a small parish in Scotland. He befriends Mark and Lisa, rebellious local teenagers who live in a world he barely understands. Their company stirs memories of earlier happiness—his days at a Catholic school in Yorkshire, the student revolt in 1960s Oxford, and a choice he once made in the orange groves of Rome. But their friendship also ignites the suspicions and smoldering hatred of a town that resents strangers, and brings Father David to a reckoning with the gathered tensions of past and present.
In this masterfully written novel, Andrew O’Hagan explores the emotional and moral contradictions of religious life in a faithless age.
The New York Times - Stephen Metcalf
Two people alone in a room, conversing; it is the basis for everything good about life. If your inner daemon requires more by way of appeasement or flattery, you have something in common with David Anderton, the antihero of Andrew O'Hagan's superb new novel, Be Near Me. Two people alone in a room, conversing—inadequate to you or to David Anderton, maybe, but not to O'Hagan, a youngish Glasgow-born novelist of astonishingly assured gifts. Quiet talk, a Bernini print on the mantle, the Clos Vougeot uncorked and breathing, is to O'Hagan what daffodils were to Wordsworth, that apparently arbitrary thing that calls forth the writer's voice, revealing the bias along which he may write as a true original.
Editorials
Carolyn See
Be Near Me is about a man distanced from everyone, most especially himself. He's utterly bewildered by life and how he should live it. But he's just as human as we are. Exactly as human as we are. Andrew O'Hagan asks us implicitly to look at our own lives, ask ourselves how clueless we may be, as we try, with courage or cowardice or both, to get from this particular day on to the next.— The Washington Post
Stephen Metcalf
Two people alone in a room, conversing; it is the basis for everything good about life. If your inner daemon requires more by way of appeasement or flattery, you have something in common with David Anderton, the antihero of Andrew O'Hagan's superb new novel, Be Near Me. Two people alone in a room, conversing—inadequate to you or to David Anderton, maybe, but not to O'Hagan, a youngish Glasgow-born novelist of astonishingly assured gifts. Quiet talk, a Bernini print on the mantle, the Clos Vougeot uncorked and breathing, is to O'Hagan what daffodils were to Wordsworth, that apparently arbitrary thing that calls forth the writer's voice, revealing the bias along which he may write as a true original.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
This burnished gem of a novel has drama, emotional resonance and intellectual power enough to recall one's favorite 19th century writers. At its center is David Anderton, a Scottish-born, Oxford-educated Catholic priest who, after years in England, assumes a parish in working-class Scotland to be closer to his mother, a writer and free spirit. Now in his 50s, David recalls his own passions vividly, but he has traded his 1960s university ideals to favor the Iraq war, and his realizations of romantic love for a life of the cloth. From early on, there's a glaring gap between David's first-person recollections and the elitist, alienating affectations he assumes with others. His Dalgarnock parishioners are suspicious of his education; his only companions are his sardonic but morally stringent housekeeper, Mrs. Poole, and a pair of thuggish teenagers, Mark and Lisa, who remind him of his own youthful rebellions. As Mark and Lisa draw David into their chaotic lives, the novel builds to an inevitable clash between the spiritual and the secular, the adult and adolescent, the utopian 1960s and the neoconservative 2000s. Throughout, O'Hagan (The Missing) enchants with his effortless prose, vivid characters and David's uncanny asides, making O'Hagan's fourth novel a heartrending tour de force. (June)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationPublishers Weekly
"This burnished gem of a novel has drama, emotional resonance and intellectual power enough to recall one's favorite 19th century writers...[A] heartrending tour de force." (Starred)Kirkus Reviews
"An impeccably crafted, philosophically framed account of the decline and disgrace of an impressionable Catholic priest. UK author O'Hagan turns to questions of insight in a beautiful but ruined 21st-century landscape." (starred)Los Angeles Times Book Review
"O''Hagan may have snatched the subject from today''s headlines, but with remarkable skill he turns potential tabloid fare on its head...There is a graceful quality to [this novel''s] circuitousness, which, despite the gravity of the subject, shows off O''Hagan''s dark wit and deftness in characterization."
— Art Winslow
Washington Post
"Be Near Me is about a man distanced from everyone, most especially himself...Andrew O''Hagan asks us implicitly to look at our own lives, ask ourselves how clueless we may be, as we try, with courage or cowardice or both, to get from this particular day on to the next."
— Carolyn See
Library Journal
"O'Hagan keeps both accused and accusers human and even noble. The most minor characters are drawn with truth and complexity, and O'Hagan's prose is stylistically dazzling, as crafted and lovely as the best poetry."Library Journal
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, O'Hagan's third novel features Father David Anderton, a proud descendant of Lancashire's Catholic martyrs, who undergoes his own ordeal when he transfers to the deprived parish of Dalgarnock. Though born in Edinburgh, he is perceived as an Englishman among Scots, an Oxford-educated wine sipper amid the ale-drinking unemployed, and a Catholic priest in an angrily Protestant town: "Northern Ireland was just across the water, and what Dalgarnock had was a briny dilution of Ireland's famous troubles, without the interest in votes, assemblies or breakable guns." Aware of all this yet politically na ve, Father David alienates locals with his insistence on high culture and tentative support for the Iraq war. When he falls into an uneasy friendship with two teenage hoodlums-whose bracing portrayal make them recognizable to any teacher-the plot takes a predictable turn toward priests behaving badly and the ensuing small-town witch trial. Though that story has been told before, O'Hagan keeps both accused and accusers human and even noble. The most minor characters are drawn with truth and complexity, and O'Hagan's prose is stylistically dazzling, as crafted and lovely as the best poetry. Recommended for most collections.-Leora Bersohn, doctoral student, Columbia Univ., New York Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.Kirkus Reviews
An impeccably crafted, philosophically framed account of the decline and disgrace of an impressionable Catholic priest. U.K. author O'Hagan (Personality, 2003, etc.) turns to questions of insight in a beautiful but ruined 21st-century landscape. The protagonist, father David Anderton, is a 56-year-old, half-English, half-Scottish intellectual and aesthete whose tastes for Chopin, Proust and French cuisine sit uneasily with his Scottish parishioners, a wasteland of alcoholic men and dehumanized youth. Anderton, whose claim to have tasted the fullness of life rests on a gay relationship with a political firebrand during the 1960s, has a weakness for stronger personalities, and now falls in with a charismatic teenage trouble-maker, 15-year-old Mark McNulty, who leads the priest into tolerating, then sampling, drugs, and eventually to a stolen kiss. Arrest and criminal charges of sexual abuse follow, forcing Anderton to review his life in the church-"a beautiful hiding place" of increasing appeal after his lover's early death. O'Hagan deftly juxtaposes absurdly precious scenes of Oxford elitism with a harsh vision of the Scottish provinces, where the working class, now all but irrelevant, has sunk into an existence shaped by booze, mass culture, tribalism and media-fuelled prejudice, as evidenced by the modern witch-hunt that ensues. After Anderton's trial and conviction comes a coda in which the death, from cancer, of his housekeeper-who doubled as his conscience-opens up an assessment of the nature of love and individual integrity. O'Hagan's accomplished prose and casual wit counterbalance his abstraction, aided by fine character portraits, especially that of an intellectually acute butisolated soul condemned by his own fallibility. Agent: Derek Johns/AP WattNew York Sun
"For all the death and, mostly repressed, sex that loom over this novel, Be Near Me is generously strewn with gentle ironies and not without moments of outright comedy...O'Hagan is mostly concerned with human frailty, a problem at once moral, aesthetic, and metaphysical."Time Out New York
"One of the remarkable things about Be Near Me...is the texture and even beauty is lends to Anderton's downfall. At a glance, the priest might seem repellent, but O'Hagan infuses him with so much complexity that his undoing...becomes undeniably tragic."Bookpage
"Beautifully written...[O'Hagan has] an ear for dialogue, and nuance in single sentences lit by unexpected insights."Booklist
"In gorgeous, melancholy prose, O'Hagan portrays a man who misapprehends both the community and himself, leading us on a thoughtful exploration of faith and of religion's role in an increasingly un-Catholic world—and, eventually, of the simple need to love and be loved....A rich and fascinating novel that promises rewards with rereading."Entertainment Weekly
"[A] beautiful, astute novel. A-"BookLoons
"Tragic, powerful, and moving, with insight into the world of English-Scottish politics, this is a book that is somewhat challenging to absorb because of its intensity, but that very factor makes it worthwhile."
— Hilary Daninhirsch