Canter Bridge

At a picnic outside Seattle two or three years back, a new friend seasoned a conversation by suggesting I might find Susan Howatch’s novels to provide some entertaining light reading.

Entertaining, in spades. Light, not for a minute.

Howatch stewards a strong novelist’s capacity to construct her characters, wielding this craft in combination with an uncanny sense for the intersection of those realities we abbreviate as ‘spiritual’ and ‘psychological’ that reside in and around her protagonists’ lives.

Set in the environment of the Church of England, with a London healing center called St. Benet’s as its principal scene, Howatch’s book narrates this first entry in the author’s ‘St. Benedict’s Trilogy’ from the perspectives of four of its 1990s-era principals. Alice Fletcher, bereft of her late aunt’s heavy, guiding hand, lost in a quiet storm of self-deprecation, turns out along the way to have understood what a pair of skilled priests could not. In the mix, she finds the love she always imagined only the fine and the pretty could ever know. Lewis, curmudgeonly, shaped and misshapen by Old Things, wise beyond words yet crippled by his inability to engage women on level ground, ends up alone and yet deeply loved by those who know ‘putting up with’ and loving not to be antagonists. Rosalind, for whom the reader arrives at sympathy only after taking the measure of her wounds, simply fades away from Nicholas, the husband to whom she was never truly married.

This leaves us to Nicholas, Howatch’s perennial limping hero, psychic priest, a man so gifted that it is almost inevitable that his spiritual insight should wreck him. He loses Rosalind–whom he never truly possessed–and finds himself in the novel’s final pages brought near to ‘dear little Alice’ in the love that no one suspected could ever be.

Along the way, Howatch deploys an unsettling vision into the things that go wrong in the heart of a man or woman gifted and summoned to serve others via an extraordinary calling. Nicholas, the book’s ‘wonder worker’, knows almost more than any human being should. Ninety-nine times of a hundred, he manages to exercise this special knowledge in a way that heals and elevates the broken human beings who flow to St. Benet’s in the hope of finding a mercy that understands and, sometimes, restores.

Yet it is the one of a hundred that undoes this man, as it takes apart the life and integrity of so many like him.

Howatch would, perhaps, deny any didactic intention in producing such novels. Her intention, she demurs, is the purpose of any novelist: to entertain.

Yet authorial caveats notwithstanding, there is far more here than entertainment, though this abounds.

There are powers and principalities, truth in bed with lies, extraordinary perception in the eyes of men and women who are, in moments, half-blind. There are ordinary, foot-dragging human beings capable of extraordinary, private heroics. And the reverse.

This book fulfills its author’s stated purpose and then races on toward auxiliary usefulness. At the risk of suggesting a readership narrower than the one that might profitably take up and read The Wonder Worker, this reviewer hastens to suggest that pastoral groups of all kinds, seminary classes, those who counsel broken souls and encounter the risk inherent in such intimacy, might find this novel—for this is what it purports to be—a window into things both entertaining, qualifying, earnest, and mysterious.