There are many questions about the clerical abuse scandal that will continue to await answers as long as those in leadership positions in the major Christian churches have to be dragged reluctantly into acknowledging the extent of their institutions’ culpability. And for the laity in these churches, there is a different but related dilemma: how could this have been going on under our noses without us realising? Or did we, but choose to look away?
Michael Arditti has a reputation for not looking away as a novelist whose focus often falls on religion. His prize-winning Easter in 2000 was unflinching in addressing the many levels of hypocrisy in organised religion around sexuality. And The Choice, his 13th novel, is similarly uncompromising.
In an ordinary Church of England parish in Cheshire, the vicar Clarissa Phipps stumbles upon her chief bellringer – also the husband of her best friend – fondling a 15-year-old boy. She knows that she has to report it – in that sense, at least, the church has moved on – but almost immediately she is put under a barrage of conflicting pressures to compromise that clarity of purpose: by her cynical husband, her taciturn adolescent son (a close friend of the abuse victim), her pious old-school mother, widow of an Anglican bishop and her own sense of guilt.
As a young woman in the 1980s, before ordination, Phipps had made a radio documentary about celebrated artist Seward Wemlock, decorating the inside of the very same Cheshire church where she is now vicar with a recreation of the Garden of Eden. His work was hailed as a masterpiece but she had suspected, indeed been told by one of the two local youngsters that Wemlock had used as his models for the naked figures of Adam and Eve, that he had abused them.
Yet she had looked away, in part because she gave a higher value to his work than the testimony of his victims. Here, Arditti enters the ongoing debate of whether the artistic merit of a work exonerates the artist, as with Eric Gill, who sexually abused his daughters, and whose 1931 sculpture of Prospero and Ariel stands over the entrance of BBC Broadcasting House.
Past sins, present values, forgiveness and redemption all inform this subtle modern morality tale. But it is the sheer human misery and lifelong damage done by abuse – so often belittled when churches speak only of “historic cases” – that are most harrowing and make The Choice such a compelling read.
• The Choice by Michael Arditti is published by Arcadia (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
