Be Near Me

Book Review

Andrew O'Hagan

Be Near Me is Andrew O'Hagan's third novel, and his finest work to date, solidifying his position as one of the greatest writers of our day. The man could not write an ungraceful sentence if he tried, and is always a supreme pleasure to read, whether he is writing about an English priest, an anorexic child singing sensation, or the United States Republican National Convention. This is the story of an English priest, Father David, who moves to Scotland during middle life to take over the parish of Dalgarnock. He has a difficult time fitting in with most of the townspeople, but two teenagers, Mark and Lisa, seem to accept him. The result of his closeness with these youths is a horrible scandal, and the experience causes Father David to reflect back on his life – his childhood in Lancashire , the turmoil of a 1960s Oxford , his past love.

Father David's story begins in 2004, when he has been in Dalgarnock for several months. He seems to live a quietly composed life, cultured but solitary, with his housekeeper Mrs. Poole as his primary source of companionship. Mrs. Poole is uneducated, but a self-taught lifelong learner who takes adult education French classes. Father David's mother describes her as, “a heroine from Jane Austen: she would have distinguished herself in any class, yet her circumstances acted upon her like a series of privations she was determined to overcome.” Mrs. Poole believes that her conversations with Father David expand her horizons and enable her to practice the things she has learned. They both enjoy bantering with each other.

When he isn't working at the church, Father David teaches at St. Andrews :

“I took the chance to talk about Pugin and William Byrd to the senior students. They seem to enjoy it well enough, so long as you let them drink their foul fizzy drinks throughout the lesson and didn't give them homework.”

In one of his classes, Father David meets Mark McNulty and Lisa Nolan. They talk trash and act tough, but the priest sees something inexplicable in them. And it is Father David's desire to “embrace their carelessness” that is his downfall. He grows closer to them initially at Lisa's sister's wedding, at which he presides. They approach him and try to shock him by getting him to hold condoms. They seem amused at trying to disturb his composure, and seem to appreciate his informal candor. After this, they sometimes stop by the rectory to awaken him by throwing rocks at his window, drawing the somnolent Father David out to nighttime chats in the nearby housing estate or at the swings in the park. Father David learns more about the youths through these encounters:

“…they often smelled of glue and spoke to me as if I were a natural enemy of authority. They spoke of stolen money and home-made cider and air pistols. They went out joyriding in stolen cars at night whilst pretending to sleep over with friends. Over the months, I began to known worse things about them, how little they cared about life, how dehumanized they could be, yet I know I did nothing to oppose them. I gave in to every aspect of them, every aspect of myself. I watched them as one might watch people in a film, because he was beautiful, because I liked how they seemed to think of me.”

Father David continues to balance his growing casual relationship with Mark and Lisa with the responsibilities of his parish – teaching, giving sermons, visiting parishioners, still trying to fit into the Scottish parish, but struggling because of his separateness. It seems as if the only people he can be close to are Mark and Lisa and Mrs. Poole, who reveals that she has cancer and is counting on the Father to treat her no differently.

One evening, after another occasion of Father David playing sidekick to Mark's pranks, they return to the rectory alone and have some wine at Mark's insistence. Mark combines the wine with half a pill, and it is in this hazy, early morning hour that Father David oversteps his closeness with Mark – much to Mrs. Poole's surprise when she enters the rectory.

Mrs. Poole finds Father David “repulsive,” and perhaps feels a bit spurned. While she is absorbing her discovery, Father David hosts a dinner party for fellow priests and teachers. The group talks politics rather than religion – or perhaps more aptly, as is these days, in conjunction with religion – and this gives O'Hagan the opportunity to display his insights into American politics and the war in Iraq (he reported from the Republican National Convention in 2003).

Eventually Mrs. Poole shares her knowledge, and Dalgarnock seethes with rage and hysteria. Father David is removed from his post, and the rectory is trashed, rendering it unsafe to live in. As Father David deals with the consequences of his actions, he reflects back on his life – the turmoil and heady excitement of Oxford in the 60s, his lost love Conor, his relationship with his father, his tattered faith.

Throughout the story, O'Hagan plays with themes of closeness and estrangement, tying in with the novel's simple yet descriptive title – Be Near Me. It is perhaps Father David's desire for, and fear of, closeness that leads him to his sin with Mark. It is the scandal that truly shows who will endure to remain near to him in spite of his transgressions.

This is appalling subject matter, and it is to O'Hagan's credit that he handles it with such sensitivity. His writing is gorgeous, horrifying, poignant, and insightful, as he delves into Father David's past and present to attempt to understand his behavior. The writing in this novel simply cannot be denied, and it is the reason why the 2006 Man Booker Prize should be awarded to Andrew O'Hagan!

Love's cruel paternity. We were hardly born. We were hardly named. I often see how real life would have made us banal. Victims of forgotten hope, we would have lived too closely, perhaps, and learned to hate the smallness of each other's habits, the unlovable, tense hostility of needs and doubts and supposed obligations. Conor had the bad grace to lose his life at a moment of unimpeachable promise. But we might have come to hate one another, to see only faults and bad faith. It comforts me to think so. He lost his life before his love of life or me was tired, so becoming one of the golden boys of Oxford after all, not falling down in a hail of foreign fire Ypres, not dying of consumption on a wormy bench, but growing drowsy, it seems, in the foothills of the Chilterns, and crashing his car on the A30 outside High Wycombe. I had gone back to Oxford on the train and must have been in bed when he died, the scent of him still on the pillows and daylight coming at the window.

I see Conor reaching into the crowd with a smile as large as the decade that made him. I see the great hope on his face and his readiness to invent the air one might breathe. At night, I sometimes see him driving down to the place where the river Wye runs through the valley of Buckinghamshire . I hear his scarred heart and see his eyes closing as he falls asleep. And I say: be near me. The world is rowdy and nothing is certain. Do not stray. None of us was meant to face the day and the night alone, though that is what we do and memory now is a place of fading togetherness. Be near me. True love is what God intends.

I never saw Conor's body, I never spoke to his mother or father in Liverpool and I didn't attend the funeral. I never took my degree and the years I think have only enlarged the space now filled by his absence. That is all I know. I went once to find the spot where they say he died. There was a stone bridge and some beech trees there; just a dimple of the land. I kept a local taxi waiting and the driver said that most of the trees in the area had been cut down by the furniture industry. He told me that furniture was a way of life down there. Even the football team kept the thought in mind, he said, calling themselves the Chair Boys. There wasn't a cloud in the sky. No markings to ponder on. It was the year everybody got shot. Bobby Kennedy. Rudy Dutchke. Andy Warhol. Martin Luther King. Conor would perhaps have grown to like the world of professional politics. So many of them did. He hadn't time to see, as we have done, how the spark of rebellion might one day become the glow of opportunism, the burn of compromise, the hail of fire in Iraq . We know that death has its fearsome prerogatives: to freeze ethics in their prime, to make a ghost of a beautiful face, and all who survive the Conors of the world must live now with the accident of their high example. He will not change. He cannot change. It is we who change and make our way, the prices of the real world becoming more tolerable with time. Yes indeed. We look around and they have gone and we are left to betray their world.