The Kingdom

by Emmanuel Carrère Allen Lane 400pp £20 The Week Bookshop £17 “Emmanuel Carrère is said by many to be one of the best writers in France,” said Bryan Appleyard in The Sunday Times. “Yet in Britain he is hardly read.” His new book – “a huge bestseller in France” – may change that. Described by the author as a “non-fiction novel”, it is simultaneously a memoir of Carrère’s spell as a “ferociously devout” Catholic in the early 1990s and an account of the early years of Christianity, told mainly through the lives of St Paul and St Luke. Carrère’s style is both ultraconversational (he writes “as if it all just pours out uncorrected”) and “hugely, heroically self-indulgent”. He is convinced that his own “crises and intuitions” are “also those of humanity”: then again, many “great works of literature are acts of self-indulgence”. The Kingdom is “thrilling, magnificent and strange”.

It’s also “tremendously French”, said Catherine Nixey in The Times. Carrère (in case we were in any doubt) refers to himself as “horribly intelligent”. At one point, he breaks off discussing Luke’s evangelism to describe a favourite porn clip of a young woman masturbating, which he then sends “to his wife (she approves)”. The memoir sections are “utterly brilliant”. But when Carrère (pictured) plunges into early Church history, the results are more mixed. Although he’s a “vivid” and “knowledgeable” guide, it is “really very hard to make the Bible feel fresh”; at times he veers “dangerously into trendy vicar territory”. For all its outrageousness, this book is “also an act of devotion”, said David Sexton in the London Evening Standard. Carrère proclaims himself moved by his religious “former self”, and wants to “avoid coming down too firmly” on the side of atheism. The Kingdom is audacious, moving and inventive. “There’s never been anything quite like it before.”