Richard T Kelly
Faber & Faber, 500pp, £12.99
AMBITION IS A QUALITY ALL TOO often lacking in debut novels, but no-one could accuse Crusaders of any deficiency on that score. Its one-word title sums up the big themes of religion and industry (th
e Crusader being a car), played out over more than 500 pages by a large cast that even includes Tony Blair.
Blair's remark that Pontius Pilate "commands our moral attention not because he was a bad man, but because he was so nearly a good man" serves as the epigraph for a story set in the period prior to Labour's 1997 election victory, when Anglican priest John Gore returns to his native north-east England to start up a new church in a deprived part of Newcastle. His sister, Susannah, is PA and mistress to Labour MP Martin Pallister, and Gore gets into a romantic tangle of his own, bedding one of his parishioners and attracting the attention of local hard man, Stevie Coulson. Gore, we suspect from the outset, is a "nearly good man", as of course is Blair himself, whose New Labour project hangs in the background.
Publisher Faber is pitching this novel as "a major debut of huge contemporary relevance", yet its style immediately strikes an oddly archaic tone, reminiscent of 19th-century fiction. Gore's is a world of "chattels" and "victuals", where things go "hither and thither". At first this seems to be Gore's own slightly priggish voice running through the narrative, perhaps meant ironically; but no, the 31-year old Gore turns out to speak just like anybody else, and sometimes surprisingly crudely, given his religious calling. The mannered prose is instead the voice of an omniscient narrator, stage-managing a drama whose players are always kept at arm's length.
The retro writing style will strike some readers as a mark of quality, but the sense of characters as puppets makes Crusaders an emotionally uninvolving read: it is hard to care very much whether Gore's efforts to run a church in an inner-city school will pay off. It is also hard to believe in the liaison he strikes up with Lindy, a single mother who is his conduit to the seamier side of Newcastle life.
Lindy and her ex, Stevie, are the book's most vibrant figures, battling hardship and winning our sympathy, even when up to no good. Also attractive are the motley assemblage of do-gooders, meddlers and the genuinely concerned who help get the new church going.
But it is always the big picture that we are directed towards. Crusaders is neatly structured in large sections telling the back stories of Gore, Stevie and Pallister, creating a three-act structure whose curtain falls are signalled by carefully placed switches of viewpoint. Kelly has previously authored books on cinema, and one senses a touch of Hollywood here, though in an afterword he cites the influence of Dostoevsky: something I would never otherwise have noticed.
One of Dostoevsky's great tricks was to provide his characters with antagonists of equal substance, but the opposite numbers of Gore and Pallister are squibs, while Stevie offers only muscle. Equally, Dostoevsky was a master of voices, but although Crusaders is well stuffed with Geordie vernacular, it is also curiously monotone. The upwardly mobile Susannah wears a Tag Heuer watch yet seems no more careful than Lindy about ending her sentences with "but". It is almost as if Kelly is so fixated on the big issues in the background that he lets the people in front go out of focus.
The novel is Dostoevskian to the extent that it aims at a kind of social realism, but what that leads to here is a work that proceeds through accumulation of detail rather than development of plot or character, over-filled and decidedly too leisurely in pace.
Most of Pallister's sub-plot could be removed without loss; he is perilously close to that well-known stock figure, the blunt-speaking northern Labour MP on the take. As for Gore, things happen to him, but the only sense we get of his spiritual values is in his sermons. He is certainly no Karamazov.
What that leaves is the Stevie and Lindy saga, which could have made for a decent thriller in its own right. A firmer editorial hand might have insisted on something like that, but the result would have been small in scale, swift in pace, commercial in appeal, and unlikely to attract the notice of heavyweight critics. Instead what we have is a doorstopper that is apparently being hailed in some friendly quarters as the novel of the decade: the kind of advance publicity any first-time novelist can do without. Crusaders commands our critical attention not because it is a great book, but because it is so nearly a good one.
The full article contains 813 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
