Something is stirring in the catacombs. A new cultural revival is thriving and emerging from the shadows. New works of fiction by Catholic writers are being written and published, which are as countercultural and refreshing as Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” had been when it had surfaced in similarly dark days in the mid-nineteenth century.
The leading lights of the Catholic Literary Revival of the Twentieth Century shone forth their brilliance in the fullness and freshness of the light of day. They swam in the cultural mainstream. They were invited to the public square. They could beg to differ with their agnostic or atheist contemporaries without fear of being silenced or “cancelled”.
Times have changed.
Today, Catholic writers are not tolerated in the name of “tolerance”. They have been excluded from the foulness of the culturally polluted and failing light of the increasingly dismal day. They cannot swim in the toxic waters of the cultural mainstream. They are excluded from the public square. They have been silenced and “cancelled” by their agnostic or atheist contemporaries.
But times are changing.
Something is stirring in the catacombs. A new cultural revival is thriving and emerging from the shadows. New works of fiction are being written and published, which are as countercultural and refreshing as Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground had been when it had surfaced in similarly dark days in the mid-nineteenth century. These new notes from underground need to be more widely known and read. Here, therefore, is a list of twelve novels, published in the twenty-first century, a dazzling dozen, which enlighten the darkness and which offer new hope for the future.
Bearings and Distances by Glenn Arbery (Wiseblood Books) exposes the raw nerve of decadence with excruciating realism. In its pages, in which lust runs rampant, we discover how viciousness fills the moral vacuum left by the absence of virtue. Lionized sexuality, which liberates the libido with libertine abandon, leaves a trail of damaged and destroyed lives behind it. Amidst the madness and the maelstrom of uninhibited sexual liberation, the chastity and charity of the still small voice of Christian calm illustrates that sanity is ultimately inseparable from sanctity.
Skylark Farm by Antonia Arslan (Vintage Books) is harrowing historical fiction. Set against the backdrop of the Armenian Genocide, this powerful novel is shocking in its graphic depiction of the cruelty of the Turks but also encouragingly redemptive in its portrayal of the resilience of the innocent victims of such cruelty. Silent Angel, also by Antonia Arslan (Augustine Institute/Ignatius Press), tells the true story of how a handful of Armenians, fleeing the genocidal terror, rescue a priceless medieval illuminated manuscript from a monastery, which had been destroyed by the Turks, the monks having been martyred. Carrying the heavy manuscript, which serves metaphorically as a cross, the fellowship of refugees, fleeing for their lives, put those lives at risk to save the ancient tome, a symbol of their unbroken Christian faith and tradition.
Saplings of Sherwood by Avellina Balestri (Pearl of Tyburn Press) is Book One of The Telling of the Beads, an imaginative retelling of the legend of Robin Hood. As its title suggests, this first book in the series introduces Robin Locksley, the future Robin Hood, as a child, a mere sapling who is yet to emerge as the formidable and indomitable full-grown outlaw. We also meet other children, including Maid Marian, who are destined to become good friends or hated enemies in the years (and the books) to come. It should be stressed, however, that this is a book in which children take cente stage which is nonetheless not a children’s book. It is set against a gruesomely realistic backdrop of physical and sexual abuse of the poor and defenceless, a world in need of the justice which Robin Hood will bring.
This Thing of Darkness by K. V. Turley and Fiorella de Maria (Ignatius Press) is a creepy tale of a young woman journalist’s close encounter with the strange figure of Bela Lugosi, a fading and largely forgotten Hollywood actor who is obsessed with his role as Dracula in old films and perhaps possessed by the dark spirit of Dracula himself. As the fading star seeks to get inside the journalist’s head with stories of his beguiling and bewitching past, the journalist begins to fear for her own soul. Who is possessed and who is possessing whom? A tale of sin’s corrupting influence, it shows how pride can gollumize the soul until it shrinks and shrivels into its own narcissistic worship of itself.
The Awakening of Miss Prim by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera (Simon and Schuster) is a charming and delightfully disarming tale of a modern self-absorbed woman’s rite of passage from pride to humility. It is a journey of the body from the virtual reality of the city to the primary reality of the village and the journey of a soul from narcissism to a realization of the necessity of virtue.
Treason by Dena Hunt (Sophia Institute Press) is an historical novel set in Elizabethan England, at a time when it was a crime punishable by death to be a priest and a crime punishable by death to shelter a priest from the authorities. It will remind those who have read them of Come Rack! Come Rope! and By What Authority? by the Edwardian priest-novelist, Robert Hugh Benson, and it says much for Miss Hunt’s powers as a storyteller that her own novel holds its own in such illustrious company.
The Letters of Magdalen Montague by Eleanor Bourg Nicholson (Chrism Press) is probably less known than her other novels, A Bloody Habit and Brother Wolf, both of which offer an orthodox Catholic spin on the genre of gothic horror. The Letters of Magdalen Montague, her first work of fiction, is altogether different, though retaining the gothic ambience and the sense of the demonic. An epistolary novel, the life of the eponymous Monsieur Montague unfolds in the letters of a mysterious and anonymous narrator to the equally mysterious and anonymous recipient of his correspondence. Short in length but not in literary stature, this atmospheric novella is reminiscent of the work of the French Decadent novelist, Joris Karl Huysmans, in its depiction of the spiritual trajectory of a derelict soul towards conversion.
Any litany of good twenty-first century literature must include the work of the incomparable Michael D. O’Brien. Best known perhaps for his early novel, Father Elijah, published at the end of the last century, Mr. O’Brien has published many books of great gravitas which deserve a place in this dazzling dozen. It might seem a little surprising, therefore, that I have chosen a work of his which is characterized by its levitas rather than its gravitas. The Lighthouse (Ignatius Press) is much shorter than the weighty tomes that Mr. O’Brien normally writes but its brevity and levity should not disguise the deeply spiritual dimension inherent in its theme of friendship and self-sacrificial love.
Tim Powers is another author whose omission from the “dazzling dozen” would be nothing less than criminal. Best known to popular culture as the author whose works inspired The Pirates of the Caribbean films, he has written many strange novels which are weird in the original Anglo-Saxon meaning of the word. For the Anglo-Saxons, the palpitating and penetrating presence of the supernatural and especially the divine was wyrd. Tim Powers’ books are wyrd, or weird, in this way. An unabashed Catholic by profession and practice, Powers infuses all his works with the supernatural because reality itself is infused with the supernatural. Those who don’t see the weirdness of things are not seeing things at all. By his own estimation, Declare (Subterranean Press) is the best of his books and the present author is not minded to disagree. Set in the twentieth century, the story straddles the period from the Spanish Civil War to the Cold War. A spy thriller on the surface, it is what is happening under the surface which provides the spiritual depth. As the plot develops and devolves in devilish directions, we come to see that pragmatism is demonic and that Machiavellian realpolitik is a mask for the presence of dark and satanic forces.
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (Penguin Books) reflects the spirit of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in its exposure of the darkness of the Soviet Union. The gentleman who serves as the novel’s protagonist also serves as an antagonist to the spirit of Marxism which has imprisoned him and which seeks to crush him. The gentleman prevails through his stubborn resistance to the iconoclasm of the new regime and his equally stubborn adherence to the civilized values of the old world which Marxism was seeking to supersede and replace. The gentleman’s dissident and resilient spirit, defying the secularist spirit of the age in which he finds himself, will inspire those of us who seek similar resilience to a similar secularist spirit.
The final book in the dazzling dozen is Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin (Oneworld Books). Also set in Russia but in a very different Russia from that in which Amor Towles’ novel is set, Laurus follows the life of a simple soul in the plague and pestilence-ridden fifteenth century. Possessed with great healing powers, the protagonist is also possessed by his own guilt-ridden past and is in greater need of healing than those whom he restores to health. Through many trials, he moves from mere simplicity to the deeper silliness of the holy foolishness of mysticism, attaining through grace-filled suffering the sanity of sanctity which is but madness to the eyes of the world.
So ends this selection of a dozen works of contemporary literature which dazzle the reader with their brilliance. Their light needs to shine ever brighter so that an endarkened world can be enlightened by their presence. We can help spread this light by reading these contemporary classics ourselves and then recommending them to others. Their beauty might not save the world, as Dostoevsky had hoped, but it will help to save souls and to restore the culture of Christendom. May such beauty be praised.
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The featured image is “Sunday Reading in Rural Schools. Oil on canvas. The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg” (1895) by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.