BEST BOOKS ON... PRIESTS

NEVER mind what’s happening in the actual Church in the run-up to Easter. My pressing Lenten question is: does every generation have a hot screen priest?

Obviously, these potentially idolatrous ponderings are prompted by Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, which promises to reach an incendiary conclusion on the BBC tonight.

In it, brilliant Irish actor Andrew Scott plays a recently ordained Catholic cleric whose potential demons (gin-in-a-tin for elevenses, anyone?) were obvious, even before Fleabag became a temptation.

Scott is not the first small-screen priest to make viewers hot under the collar. I am just old enough to remember the national will-theywon’t-they anxiety sparked by Richard Chamberlain’s Ralph De Bricassart in The Thorn Birds. Protestants of any kind — high, low, Anglican, Quaker, Brethren, Free Presbyterian, Zwinglian — just don’t cut it in the desire stakes: that vow of celibacy needs to be tested.

All the way through Western literature, priests have been tested and sometimes found wanting.

The Western Wind, by Samantha Harvey, is set in the fictional Somerset backwater of Oakham in 1491. Harvey chose that date because it was just before the world changed irrevocably with the discovery of the New World and the Reformation.

Her narrator is village priest John Reve, roughly woken on Shrove Tuesday to the news that a bloated corpse has been seen in the river. Is it the body of his missing friend, Newman? If so, which sin brought about his death: suicide or murder?

Another medieval cleric turns detective in Umberto Eco’s blockbuster The Name Of The Rose. In 1327, Franciscan friar William of Baskerville arrives at a monastery for theological disputation to discover there’s a killer on the loose.

In Graham Greene’s riveting The Power And The Glory, a selfdestructive ‘whisky priest’ becomes an unlikely hero when he stands up to tyranny in Mexico. With Easter approaching, why not make one of these a bookshop holy order?