A taste of faith and conflict
A review of the novel The Young Cleric by Evaristus Bassey Publisher: Caritas Nigeria Press Number of Pages: 248 Year of Publication: 2006 (2nd Edition Ikeogu Oke Reviewer:
Afather, willing to educate his son, insists on his studying law. But the son prefers to be a Catholic priest. Such rebellion is the leitmotif of The Young Cleric by Evaristus Bassey, its vertebrae from which various thematic cartilages branch into the story. This is evident from the propelling dialogue between father, simply called Chief, and son, Ebarim, whereupon the son resolves to have his way and realises later, upon visiting home after receiving news of the father’s death, that the father had cursed him for his disobedience, much to the mother’s displeasure.
Then, in the manner of real life when fiction tries to portray it, things turn complicated for Ebarim, and he realises that achieving his goal of becoming a Catholic priest is not going to be a piece of cake to be grabbed and wolfed down after a walk in the park.
The father’s persuasion ends: “…no matter what a man’s religion may be, no matter how sophisticated he may become, he must not disrespect the ways of his elders” (p. 32). His response ends: “For all this while, Papa, your dream was my dream. I really wanted to be a lawyer. I never saw myself as anything else. But now it seems so different. I think God has spoken to me” (p. 32). Thus we are introduced to the main conflict in the novel - between a father’s career prescription and a son’s desire to make his own career choice.
But as the son sets out on his preferred path, we are told that “had he not completed the process of going into a Catholic Major Seminary, he would have given up on the entire idea” (p. 35). This angst grows from his dissatisfaction with his inadequate entry requirements despite receiving a waiver from the institution. He plods on in what proves to be a story of entangled conflicts, becoming a medium through which we apprehend the complexity and imperfections of the Catholic institution, especially its seminary component, its nursery for the priesthood.
Some seminarians, tempted with worldly pleasures, backslide and abandon their clerical pursuit. Facilities and provisions at the seminary sometimes prove inadequate or overstretched. And sexual temptation as in the specific case of Ebarim - becomes one of the hurdles some seminarians must scale towards ordination. As one Reverend Father says to Ebarim, “You will see many more things. Sometimes even scandalous. It happens wherever there is human society. Man is not an angel. Even then, remember that first scandal in heaven?” (p. 42).
It is such portrayal of the church as a useful but flawed institution, like all human institutions, that makes The Young Cleric a credible novel, fiction steeped in verisimilitude. And it plumbs in other ways the depths of the human malaise, as in the conflict between Bishop Ekpe of the Kalaro Diocese and the scheming priests under his supervision, and the indigenes of Ebarim’s village who would rather have their son incardinated in their diocese regardless of episcopal preference, highlighting ethnicity as one of the issues in the church as well as the novel. “The Nuncio quite aware that ethnicity was a cantankerous issue in the Nigerian society felt that the Church should be insulated from it…,” comments the narrator.
Set in Nigeria, The Young Cleric is a highly readable novel written in unhampered prose with a rather labyrinthine but traceable plot. And sometimes the reader is ambushed by such striking insights into human psychology as, “It was like, having looked forward too much to something, when finally it came you discovered you had expended all the desire you would have lavished on it in expectation” (p. 223).
African traditional beliefs are upheld despite the influence of the church: A young man goes hunting in the forest and dies under circumstances his spirit regards as shameful. He frustrates the effort of his peers to retrieve his body from the forest for burial by assuming a weight far higher than they could lift. He is then pacified by a propitiatory rite whereupon he lightens the load of his body to be taken for burial.
Close to his graduation, Ebarim makes a remark that Bishop Ekpe interprets as a sign that he is not ready to bear the heavy responsibilities of a priest. Then follows an agonising wait which Bishop Ekpe institutes to test his preparedness. His patience overstretched and near to snapping, the bishop finally offers him a posting to serve under him. But, true to his independent mind, he politely declines the offer, preferring to serve elsewhere.
This is also a novel of development criticism whose central theme poses a question: Is the cause of human development better served by parents choosing careers for their children or children being allowed to make the choice? The trajectory of the protagonist’s life reflects the author’s belief that it should be the latter.
And it is a multi-dimensional developmental criticism, as signified by the hint that we cannot build strong institutions on weak infrastructure or by inadequately catering for such institutions and their members. This is implied in the portrayal of the distress resulting from the poor resourcing of and overstretched facilities in the seminary, which could be any other public institution in Nigeria.
The developmental criticism becomes direct in some cases, as in the reference to Ebajig, a town whose “Chiefs did not give their full support to the colonial administration, so the white man retaliated by stalling the town’s development” (p. 11). Subsequently, the intrigues of power in the postcolonial era leaves it with “no public electricity, no potable water, and travelling from the city to Ebajig on the rough bumpy road was the easiest way of terminating a pregnancy” (p. 11).
But despite its aesthetic merits, the book is marred by physical flaws. On page 122 there are two spelling variants (“programs” and “programmme”) for one word, and some of the pages (pp. 78-83) are out of sequence, to mention just two.