Premises for novels

I've recently finished reading Piers Paul Read's most recent novel, The Death of a Pope. It is a well written and interesting thriller without, I think, ranking among the best of Read's novels.

What I found most interesting is that it shares a central premise with Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, in that the threat is to cardinals in conclave, but reverses Brown's version of this premise, in that the threat comes from a liberal Catholic (in protest against the effect that the Roman Catholic Church's teaching on contraception is perceived to have on the spead of HIV/Aids in Africa) instead of coming from a conservative Catholic (in protest against the scientific search for the God particle through the Hadron Collider).

Read is a conservative Catholic and presumably wants to show that there are reasons why liberal Catholicism could contemplate terrorism as well as or more likely rather than conservative Catholicism. I'm a little unsure as to why one would want to enter into a kind of competition to show why your faith contains the potential for terrorism unless it is about exploring how fanaticism can develop from faith and acknowledging that all faith including our own holds the potential for such fanaticism.

Unfortunately, although their narratives retain the reader's interest, neither Read's or Brown's central characters convince as fully realised characters, reading more as cyphers for the premises which drive their narratives.

By contrast, Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God deliver a central Catholic priest who is wonderfully himself despite the extremities of situation and suffering into which he is placed. These novels have their own premises. They are, for example, a brilliant demostration of the difficulties of communicating the Gospel in another culture and, as such, are on a par with Shusaku Endo's Silence and The Samurai. But these premises are not what drive the narrative instead they emerge from the story in a way that is consistent with the narrative rather than shaping it as seems to me to be the case in The Death of a Pope and Angels and Demons.

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After the Fire - Dancing In The Shadows.