Easter - Softcover

Arditti, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1905147937 ISBN 13: 9781905147939

Publisher: Arcadia Books, 2008

Synopsis

Winner of the Mardi Gras and Waterstone's Book awards, longlisted for the Costa Novel award.

'It's a delight to find a modern novel that takes religion and all the objections to it seriously as a subject: the rockpool of a London parish teems with all kinds of curious life.' - Philip Pullman, Sunday Times

'Michael Arditti's new novel, with its three sections and cast of thousands mirroring the time-honoured triptych, delivers a technically impressive, emotionally moving and deeply disturbing chronicle of death and resurrection. A profoundly and passionately religious novel.' - Peter Stanford, Independent on Sunday

'A huge book written with wit, compassion and a sharp critical eye. The writing is packed with daring imaginative leaps. Apart from Arditti's brilliant comic skills, there is a deep moral core to the book.' - Financial Times

'Michael Arditti's brilliant novel. A latterday Passion story of great distinction.' - Observer

'The author handles his material with considerable skill. Few other contemporary British writers of fiction are prepared to become immersed in metaphysical territory. Arditti's dialogue and imagery are memorable, and his eye for the quirks of Anglo-Catholicism recalls Barbara Pym at her best. His depiction of strong emotions - especially suffering - proceeds from deep feeling and is always honest.' - Daily Telegraph

In a fictional climate dominated by materialism, Easter stands apart in its bold exploration of the nature of God, the problem of suffering and the existence of evil. With an unforgettable gallery of characters ranging from a Holocaust survivor and an African princess to AIDS patients and Queen Elizabeth II, Arditti paints a dazzling panorama of contemporary society. In its radical fusion of the sacred and profane, Easter throws down a challenge to believers and non-believers alike.

About this title

Review:

Can AIDS and the universal agony it brings--not only to its sufferers but to all who suffer on the sidelines--be interpreted as a reworking of the great Christian myths of holy week? Michael Arditti thinks so. He fictionally explores his thesis, which has the potential to be profoundly disturbing, in his new novel Easter with a huge cast centred on the high church parish of St Mary-in-the-Vale, Hampstead.

Gay curate Blair Ashley is a former lover of recently deceased AIDS sufferer Julian Blaikie, parishioner and aristocrat whose Lady Bracknell-esque mother is aggressively unsympathetic. Then there's Lyndon Brooks, infatuated adolescent worshipper, Esther the bishop's wife, who discovers her true lesbian self at age 53, and a pair of women who are married in church by the curate without the knowledge of the vicar--himself happily married but beset by religious doubts. And there are more, including an HIV- positive doctor, a positive librarian and a fiercely "celibate" archdeacon who explores his perversions with a rent boy at the private altar in his cellar.

But graphic homo-erotic sex and the counterpointing of it against the homophobia of the bishop and others notwithstanding, Easter is also a novel about spirituality, suffering and the succouring role of liturgical church services, all meticulously described. Just as it would have been in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, the whole of the human experience is in Easterincluding faith, scepticism, cynicism, honesty, despair, cruelty, snobbery, guilt and corruption.

The account of Trudy England, closet childhood Jewish German refugee who at last finds "peace in herself", is very moving indeed. So is the depiction of the Nigerian Child, Cherish, another refugee, blind and dying of AIDS.

Arditti, who structures his novel in three sections--the last being a working of the events of the first from different angles--often writes with wittily shrewd and observant precision. Someone speaks with "tweed-skirted diction"; a dying man watches the words of a prayer "fly about the room like humming-birds"; and the bishop's PA tartly initiates a visitor into canon biscuit law--"Chocolates are for suffragans, bourbons for archdeacons. Vicars and curates get rich tea". --Susan Elkin

Review:

At a time when religion and religion-based hostilities are politically rife throughout the world, the novel of religion has an important place. Michael Arditti writes about Western Christianity, as it is manifest in the present Church of England, with pungency and satirical frankness. His style has Joycean echoes. Against a background of the conventional liturgies he places awful actualities in the lives of preachers and practitioners. Not explicitly, but in purpose and feeling, Easter is a novel on the New Testament theme of Christ's expulsion of the money-changers from the temple.' --Muriel Spark

'As in his excellent earlier novels, The Celibate and Pagan and her Parents, Michael Arditti is deliberately provocative: he reads at times like the unlikely love child of Derek Jarman and Barbara Pym, presenting a story of parish backbiting against a bleak backdrop of lust, corruption and disease. But this is a novel of such moral seriousness that, before long, one reaches for grander models. In the scale of its aspirations and the savagery of its satire, Easter reminds me of Charles Dickens. I think it is Arditti's masterpiece and one of the first --Damian Thompson, Literary Review

'The best thing of all about Easter is that it isn't just a book for Christians - or even just for believers. The beauty of such high-calibre social satire is that you begin to see how what applies to the Church can apply equally to other institutions where hearts, minds and cash are at stake. Arditti's combination of savage wit and magnanimous heart enables his message to melt in the mouth like a communion wafer while delivering the kick of a Holy mule. It's rare for a book to stir both the soul and the mind at once, and to provoke peals of laughter as it does so. But miracles happen. Praise be.' --The Good Book Guide

About this edition

• Publisher: Arcadia Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1905147937
• ISBN 13: 9781905147939
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400