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	A Kiss Is Not Just a Kiss When It Could Be Abuse By Andrew O'Hagan San Francisco Chronicle June 3, 2007 http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/03/RVG0OQ0GJ81.DTL&type=books "Troubles like mine begin, as they end, in a thousand places," the English Catholic priest David Anderton explains near the opening of Andrew O'Hagan's new novel, an affecting meditation on faith and disgrace, "but my year in that Scottish parish would serve to unlock everything." O'Hagan's Father David lives in the rectory in rural Dalgarnock, Scotland, officiates at Sunday Mass and teaches world religions at the local school, pleading with the usual assortment of fidgeting teenagers that "Civilisation takes many forms, and, as Christians, we must use our faith to bring peace to the lives of those people who have none." With so many stories of disgraced priests in recent years, it will come as no surprise that those students are at the center of O'Hagan's sympathetic portrayal of Father David's own fall. Perhaps inevitably, abuse and sexual misconduct are near-constant undercurrents in "Be Near Me." Father David reports that "there is said to have been abuse" at the boarding school he himself attended as a child, that "the newspapers can now produce individuals who recognise the gleam of lust on every friendly face from the past." But his own memory is far more ambiguous and ambivalent; while "some of the monks were troubled or troubling in that particular way ... 'abuse' didn't have the currency in our minds -- perhaps in anybody's mind -- that it now enjoys on a worldwide scale." This discussion, somewhat predictably, foreshadows David's own indiscretion later in the book, a transgression that comes midway through the book and passes quickly. He becomes particularly close to two students, Mark and Lisa, inexplicably drawn "to join their world and embrace their carelessness." After blurring the line between professional and social contact on several occasions, David invites Mark to the rectory to listen to music, accepts some of the young man's drugs and offers a few relatively chaste kisses in return. When the boy's parents press him to go to the police, David's life quickly collapses. He's arrested, dubbed a pedophile and stripped of his position within the parish. O'Hagan pays loving attention to the details of Dalgarnock life, as alien to the Oxford-educated English priest as it will be to most San Francisco readers. We are quickly grounded in the rugged beauty of this obscure corner of the United Kingdom in lovingly rendered scenes like this one, from a field trip David leads to a nearby island: "To the west one could see Belfast Lough and the coast of Ireland rising up in the clear afternoon, and on the other side, Scotland was quiet and complicit, its blue hills sheltering Ballantrae and massing southwards to circle Loch Doon. Further off, there were greyer hills and one could see the grades of distance, how the clods seemed smaller and lower by degrees, until the smallest hung over England." O'Hagan's masterful sketches of his more minor characters are also a treat, from young people railing against "terrorist" asylum seekers to the older generation complaining about "posh arseholes from England" who "think Scotland is a playground for shootin' and fishin'" Mrs. Poole, David's housekeeper, is handled particularly well, a woman whose "attitudes made her seem older" so that "only when she smiled did one notice she was quite young." The local sheriff -- what we would call a judge -- is described much later in a typically incisive passage: "Sheriff Wilson had the pawky upper-class humour that makes very senior lawyers intolerable. He also had the claret-dimmed sense of his own grandness in a world of moral miniatures. I knew immediately he would have stuffed animals in his house and embossed invitations on his mantel to garden parties at Holyrood House." "Be Near Me" meanders in places, and even the best chapters proceed at a slow, leisurely pace. David hosts a dinner party for his fellow priests and teachers that evolves into a protracted (and inconclusive) discussion on the morality of the present Iraq war. Another longish chapter in the second half of the novel recounts David's coming of age in the 1960s, protesting the Vietnam War and loving and losing another young man in the process. Here, too, the material is interesting and grounds the surrounding story in this early tragedy, but it goes on too long and reeks slightly of cliche. "As a priest one never grows up," O'Hagan writes toward the end of the novel. "One lives like an orphan in a beautiful paternalistic dream." In spite of everything that happens in the course of this difficult story, Father David never seems entirely shaken from that dream, and many readers may find it hard to sympathize with his plight. But those who persist will be rewarded by this unhurried exploration of the inner life of a man who turns out to be "just another person looking for faith in the cold night air."
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