What a privilege it was to publish my debut novel, The Beast of Bethulia Park, on September 30. Of all the days of the Christian calendar, it was the feast of St Jerome: the patron of librarians. Perhaps it was just an accident of fate, but I enjoyed the notion that it might also have been something of a heavenly imprimatur.
The book was formally launched in London in November, some weeks after it was made available from all major digital platforms and bookshops. It remains to be seen if it will be a success. I certainly hope it is – not only for my own benefit, but because it contains so much of what I have wanted to say over the last decade or more on the godlessness and apostasy of our age.
So far, the few parts of the book that have crept into the public dom-ain concern the sexually tense rel-ationship between the hero priest, Fr Calvin Baines, and the beautiful nurse Emerald Essien. Comparatively little has been said about Dr Reinhard Klein, the eponymous Beast and a charming, charismatic and sophist-icated killer who murders elderly and “nuisance” patients – mostly from a distorted sense of moral purpose, rather than for pleasure.
When I delve into the origins of the book, however, I find that Dr Klein existed in my mind before the arrival of Fr Baines. My ideas about Klein began to take shape in the summer of 2020, the year of lockdown. I was reading avidly, not only enjoying fiction again but also continuing to read spiritual works, among them The Confederacy of Evil, a compilation of the four great sermons given by St John Henry Newman on the theme of the Antichrist.
It was Britain’s collapse into a near state of anarchy that year, as our authentic freedoms were simultaneously withdrawn, that made me especially curious about what our newest saint had to say about the End Times. I liked reading Newman anyway, and I wanted to know what the abrupt changes to our civilisation and culture might signify.
Newman held the traditional teaching that the Second Coming would end the horrific reign of the Antichrist, but he also taught that many antetypes would prefigure the arrival of the ultimate man of iniquity, operating much like the Old Testament prophets who prepared the way for Jesus Christ.
St John, in his first Letter, noted that such figures were there from the start. “Now many Antichrists have already come”, he wrote, describing them as people who deny “both the Father and the Son”, implicitly to catastrophic effect. I sought to depict Dr Klein as one such individual.
The origins go further back than that summer, however. They undoubtedly include February 2009, when I met Fr Dermot Fenlon – a holy priest and an excellent scholar and historian – in the room of the Birmingham Oratory in which Newman died. Fr Fenlon, who him-self passed away in August this year, told me how German scholars had contacted the Oratory to say they could prove how Newman’s “theol-ogy of conscience” informed the heroism of the White Rose wartime resistance movement, several of whom were guillotined for dissemin-ating leaflets urging people to rise up against “Nazi terror”. I broke the story in the Catholic Herald. It had a tremendous personal impact on me and I stayed in touch with Fr Fenlon, who went on to complain of a long trend in the Catholic Church to pull out Newman’s fangs and water down his teachings.
He would recommend works of scholars like Fr Henry Tristram to give me a surer understanding of what Newman had to say. In the end, I chose to read Newman’s homilies on the Antichrist of my own volition, and these teachings would become so important to the book that I selected a line from the sermon called “The Times of the Antichrist” to serve as an epigraph.
The earliest origins of the book are related to the wartime era of Sophie Scholl. I’d say they date to the early 1980s when, as boy of 12 or 13, I was visited by a man who had seen the horrors of the Holocaust with his own eyes. Percival FitzGerald was my great-uncle on my mother’s side and he spent two summers at my house as he struggled with failing health.
He was an Eighth Army veteran of El Alamein and the entire Italian campaign, including battles like Monte Cassino, and somehow he must have also seen service in Austria or Germany because I remember him telling me that after the liberation of a concentration camp by American forces he was among British soldiers ordered to show local Germans the bodies of Jews murdered by the Nazis.
I have never checked out his story but, growing up, always assumed it was true. Its effect was to instil a strong bias in favour of life from a very early age. In the last decade it informed the freelance work I undertook – mostly for the Daily Mail, but also for the Mail on Sunday, the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph – in exposing the deadly abuses of patients carried out under the Liverpool Care Pathway.
I interviewed aggrieved families of patients said to have been killed by medical negligence or worse. I spoke to whistle-blowing doctors, attended inquests and conducted research into how this lethally-flawed end-of-life protocol was being implemented. The most fruitful exercise was in demonstrating how NHS trusts were paid (or “bribed” as the Mail said in its front-page splash) to increase the numbers of patients dying on the pathway and penalised for failing to meet targets.
The result of the campaign by the Mail was the abolition of the pathway as a “national disgrace” in 2014, following a review led by Baroness Neuberger. Afterwards, I continued to work with families who claimed relatives had died when subjected to the same lethal flaws in other guises. I have also campaigned against assisted suicide, and in this work I recently sat down with the son of a woman murdered by Dr Harold Shipman who described to me how the killer won the trust of his victims.
In the end, I had quite a dossier of evidence and this forms much of the subject matter of The Beast of Bethulia Park. I hasten to add that this book is by no means an attack on the NHS, but a mere acknowledgement of frailty and the temptation to corruption facing all people in all walks of life. Dr Klein is just a figure who has consciously taken the path of evil.
His surname, by the way, is a hat-tip to the Mr Kurtz (sic) of Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, who makes a similar wrongful choice (Klein is German for small, and Kurz is short). I gave him the name Reinhard after Operation Reinhard, the Nazi plan to murder two million Polish Jews. One could read his name as “small Holocaust”.
Essentially, The Beast of Bethulia Park is a story about a clash between good and evil – between a murderous doctor and a young and evangelising priest whose preaching of Newman’s “theology of conscience” has a decisive impact on the destinies of those who grow close to him.
Simon Caldwell is associate editor of the Catholic Herald
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