Be Near Me

Description

When an English priest takes over a small Scottish parish, not everyone is ready to accept him. He makes friends with two local youths, Mark and Lisa, and clashes with a world he can barely understand. The town seems to grow darker each night. Fate comes calling and before the summer is out his quiet life is the focus of public hysteria. Meanwhile a religious war is unfolding on his doorstep...

Andrew O'Hagan was born in Glasgow in 1968. His first book, The Missing, was published in 1995 and shortlisted for the Esquire/Waterstone's/Apple Non-Fiction Award. Our Fathers, his debut novel, was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. His second novel, Personality, was published in 2003 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. In January of that year Granta named him one of the Best of Young British Novelists and in April he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He lives in London.

A generous, wonderfully observed novel, and the best O'Hagan has written yet; it is also one of the few truly essential works of fiction to emerge from this country during the past 20 years or more. -- John Burnside Daily Telegraph 20060812 One of the novels of the year. -- Rodge Glass The List (Scotland) 20060810 Humour is a component of this novel's great humanity. O'Hagan is devastatingly amusing (rare enough), but even more unusually he eschews barbs, cruelty and gratuitous showing-off. ... Be Near Me establishes O'Hagan as one of our most sympathetic prose-poets. His talent is comparable to Muriel Sparks's, and he is kinder. -- Ruth Scurr The Times 20060812 A sensitive and poignant meditation on human isolation, Andrew O'Hagan's new novel is set in a small, forlorn community on Scotland's west coast ... First-rate writing and Chekhovian undertones capture a fractured society in which people are left without purpose, floundering in pools of their own isolation. Daily Mail 20060811 O'Hagan employs many elements present in his first novel, Our Fathers, though reassembles them in different shapes here. The resulting patterns are complex and subtle. -- Jonathan Derbyshire FT Magazine 20060805 A work that portrays tragedy with such intelligence, tenderness and honesty ... There are no cliches in this book ... The language is precisely attuned to the circumstances, it is felt rather than imposed, so the story seems to be released by it instead of merely enabled, like a piece of music in the hands of a virtuoso musician. Time and again, unobtrusive phrases and rhythms elegantly conjure resonances: the children with their 'small energies of disdain' ... -- John De Falbe Literary Review 20060801 O'Hagan can evoke the grittiness of working-class life. -- David McLaurin The Tablet 20060729 Be Near Me uses the same landscape of modern Scotland, visual and moral, to explore the process of gradual alienation in the life a priest who is both foreigner to the place and a stranger more significantly, to himself. O'Hagan has always been exceptionally indeed gratifyingly, precise in shaping backgrounds for his characters. Thus his protagonist David Anderton is placed for us with careful attention to detail, as to social context, religious vocation, culture and sexuality ... One of Andrew O'Hagan's great strengths is his keen engagement with the significance of the past and its extended vistas of experience, personal or collective ... In Be Near Me, the continuing references to historical context - Celtic saints, smugglers' caves, Mary Queen of Scots looking out of a castle window - prepare us for the impact of David's anguished yet simultaneously delighted recall of the late 1960s Oxford, its curiously potent mixture of innocence and pretentiousness captured here with unerring exactness ... A distinctive voice resonates clearly through the first-person narrative ... a story compounded from passion and resurrection as opposed to profession failure or spiritual collapse. Thus, without obvious irony, David Anderton, setting his face towards the present at last, achieves a triumph no less consistent with the doctrinal core of Christianity than with the regenerative outline of the Novel in its classic essence. -- Jonathan Keates TLS 20060811 Andrew O'Hagan writes beautifully ... he writes with conviction about the sectarianism of small-town western Scotland and the dispiriting character of a post-industrial working-class community ... a novel written with real generosity of spirit. -- Melanie McDonagh Evening Standard 20060807 Literary heavyweights such as Joyce Carol Oates and Norman Mailer have heaped praise on this novel. With tremendous sensitivity the author explores complex religious and political themes while maintaining a humorous warmth for his characters. O'Hagan's style is both dazzling and lyrical and his cultural references never miss a beat. This is the work of a gifted novelist at the height of his powers and an insightful and poignant analysis of the human condition - and parts of British society in particular - in recent years. -- Mairead Byrne Irish Independent 20060812 Andrew O'Hagan is no mere teller of tales. He is a state-of-the-nation novelist and a front-ranking one at that - though still only in his 30s. Both his previous novels, Our Fathers, and Personality offer unparalleled insights into the forces that can diminish, debase and often destroy ordinary lives in contemporary society. His latest novel, Be Near Me, narrated by middle-aged Catholic priest Fr David Anderton, more than adequately lives up to the expectations created by these two works ... Fr David is insulated in a world of haute culture, and could, in the hands of a less skilled novelist, have become something of a caricature, an arrogant, head-in-the-clouds prig. He may indeed be all of these things, but his boyish naivety, his intelligence, his enthusiasms and his belief in goodness, all meticulously developed by O'Hagan, bring him so fully to life that we feel protective of him throughout his largely self-induced ordeal and jubilant when, as a consequence, he comes to repossess some of the humanity and idealism that marked his student days in more sanguine times.This is an intelligent, courageous novel. -- James Ryan Irish Times 20060812 Confirms O'Hagan's rank as one of the most accomplished authors writing in Britain ... His style is almost flawless: tone, nuance, the talent to surprise and the gift of capturing passing moments are all his, deployed effectively and, for the most part, with great taste. -- James Woods Scotland on Sunday 20060813 A novel as beautiful and perfectly pitched as its title. ... O'Hagan gets everything right in this book. It is pitiful and beautiful, deluded and honest, seductive and incriminating at every point. A novel narrated by a Catholic priest in an obscure Scottish parish may sound wilfully uncool. But Be Near Me is actually fearlessly topical - as much in its way, as O'Hagan's last novel, Personality. ... It is hard to imagine a better, more beautiful novel being published this year. I will certainly be reading it again. -- Sebastian Smee The Spectator 20060805