Robert Harris’s new novel, Conclave, is set in the near future when, after the death of a pope bearing a remarkable resemblance to Pope Francis, the cardinals of the Universal Church gather in the Vatican to elect his successor.
Simply as a guide to the logistics and canonical procedures of a papal election, Conclave is outstanding. Harris, a journalist as well as a novelist, was given full access to the setting of his drama – the Sistine Chapel and the Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican guesthouse where the cardinals are immured for the duration. He has read many books, among them John Cornwell’s A Thief in the Night, and interviewed “a cardinal who participated in a conclave”.
Harris’s deceased pope, like Pope John Paul I, had a copy of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ on his bedside table. Apt passages from Scripture punctuate the interior monologue of his protagonist, Cardinal Jacopo Lomeli. There is even an excerpt from Romano Guardini’s Meditations Before Mass, and only a few small slips: Harris seems unclear as to the difference between heresy and schism, and Vespers is not “a sacramental act”.
Cardinal Lomeli, once Secretary of State and now Dean of the College of Cardinals, has the task of organising the conclave, and of preaching to the assembled electors before the proceedings begin. He has been through a dark night of the soul: “The higher he had climbed, the further heaven had receded.”
He had offered his resignation to the late pope. It had been refused on the slightly demeaning grounds that he was “a good manager”.
It turns out that Lomeli is not as “burned-out” as he imagines. In his sermon before his fellow cardinals in St Peter’s Basilica prior to the conclave – inspired, he believes, by the Holy Spirit – Lomeli casts aside the “seamlessly interlocked” platitudes of his prepared text, and declares that “the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Let us pray that the Lord will grant us a pope who doubts …”
Is this Harris’s advice to the Catholic Church? In an article in the Sunday Times written to promote Conclave, Harris pointed out that he was not a Christian and had never written about religion. “I don’t do God … But as a former political journalist I do elections and the conclave is the ultimate example of power being decided by the casting of ballots.”
Quite how much power a pope does actually possess might be questioned: Benedict XV and Pius XII failed to prevent two world wars; Paul VI to keep the smoke of Satan out of the Church following Vatican II; and our present Pope has been thwarted on the question of Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics.
Harris does not go into the issues facing the Catholic Church, but he is not without a conscience and, as so often with those who do not “do God”, falls back on political correctness.
As in earlier novels, he makes his sympathies clear by the qualities he gives to his characters. In An Officer and a Spy, a thriller about the Dreyfus Affair, the officer who prosecutes Dreyfus, Major Paty de Clam, is given breath smelling of drains, while the anti-Semitism of Harris’s hero, the whistle-blowing Colonel Picquart, is airbrushed out of the picture.
Here, the liberal Secretary of State, Cardinal Bellini, is lean and gentle, looking like “a martyred saint”, while the conservative Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Tedesco, could be “a butcher or a bus driver”, a peasant with “fat, short-fingered hands”. The “homophobic” African Cardinal Adeyemni, whose room is next to Lomeli’s, snores so loudly that the partition vibrates.
Of course Conclave is not history, it is a thriller, and as a thriller it is superb. There are mysteries almost from the start. What happened at the meeting shortly before the late pope’s death with one of the front-runners, the Canadian Cardinal Tremblay? What is one of the nuns ministering to the cardinals in the Casa Santa Marta doing in a corridor in the middle of the night? Who is the Filipino priest, Vincent Beníta, who arrives from Baghdad without any luggage, claiming that he was made a cardinal in pectore by the late pope? Why, among the toiletries provided for him at the Casa Santa Marta, does the razor remain in its cellophane wrapping?
Harris’s inspiration is sometimes apparent. One episode resembles recent events at Fifa, and another skirts dangerously close to Da Vinci Code territory (secret panels in the late pope’s bedstead). But we must thank God for small mercies: there are no paedophile priests.
Catholic readers, already familiar with the proceedings of a conclave, may feel that we have rather too much of the fruit of Harris’s research and may regret that, for all his intelligence and skill as a writer, he never really gets beyond a secular take on the Church. The twist in the tail on the last page is a case in point. Some readers will gasp. It made me groan.
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