Volume 54, Number 12 · July 19, 2007
When Life Caught Up With Him
By Claire Messud
Be Near Me
by Andrew O'Hagan
Harcourt, 305 pp., $24.00
Father David Anderton, the protagonist and narrator of Andrew O'Hagan's subtle third novel, has never been, it would seem, a very good priest. Be Near Me, set in the Scottish town of Dalgarnock in 2005, is Father David's account of his fifty-seventh year, the year of his unraveling, or his downfall, or his rebirth—depending upon how you look at it. Sent, at his own request, to Dalgarnock's humble parish of St. John Ogilvie, after years spent in 'pastoral oblivion' in Blackpool, David Anderton befriends Lisa Nolan and Mark McNulty, two beer-swilling, joint-smoking, pill-popping adolescents from his world religions class at the local Catholic school. Through these unlikely attachments he finds, as he eventually concedes to his bishop, that 'our lives are liable to catch up with us.'
Review, 3389 words
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