Novel of the week

Conclave by Robert Harris Hutchinson 304pp £20 The Week Bookshop £16

Robert Harris’s new novel is about 118 cardinals, locked in the Sistine Chapel, electing a new pope. The situation seems unlikely to display Harris’s strengths, said David Grylls in The Sunday Times. Known for his fast-paced plots and far-flung locations (“from Paris to Pompeii, from Moscow to Martha’s Vineyard”), the author mostly confines himself “to a single room” and a cast of “elderly, celibate males”. Yet Conclave is in the “authentic Harris mould” – a novel tracing the “ruthless jockeying for power of an elite group of male professionals”. Its hero, Cardinal Lomeli, is a figure of “moral obstinancy” who uncovers a crime by putting truth before propriety. Clues and puzzles abound: a sliding box hidden in a bedpost; a mysterious woman’s voice in the night. Gripping and cunning, this is a “triumphant” addition to Harris’s oeuvre.

Like its predecessors, Conclave is “as much about the details as the dramas”, said Ian Sansom in The Guardian. We learn that cardinals’ cassocks have 33 buttons (one for each year of Jesus’s life); that the Pope can create “secret” cardinals whose names are not revealed during his lifetime. Harris’s “impulse to educate” can get out of hand, but he is a master at crafting a story, and the book is “unputdownable”. It may be a page-turner, but it doesn’t always convince, said John Boyne in The Irish Times. The cardinals are quite “mundane” in their villainy compared to their real-life counterparts; many of the twists are “visible from a mile away”. A “thoughtful” novel about a papal election would have been a “fine thing”; but Conclave doesn’t stand comparison with Harris’s best work.