Drawing a titillating veil

Going In by Jenny Newman, Hamish Hamilton, £14.99
!ERE IS A GOOD novel
waiting to be written
about the impact of the Second Vatican Council on the religious life. Such a novel would have a universal theme, since the monastic life has been developed in all cultures and must therefore represent a human need. It would also have the opportunity to explore the effect of major social change upon a circumscribed community.
Finally, our hypothetical novel would have the immense advantage of dealing with a way of life in which every detail has been designed to yield a deeper meaning.
Jenny Newman has not written this novel. She has attempted to tell the story of a Liverpool girl who enters a French order and returns to the Liverpool convent at the time when the Council reforms are beginning to take effect.
Newman was herself a nun for five years, so she should know what she is talking about. Unfortunately, she proceeds from the mistaken assumption that to make her subject accessible she should treat it as superficially as possible.
Yet, on the superficial level the religious life makes no sense at all and the nonsensical can only become tedious. Brigid, Newman's heroine, seems perversely wedded to triviality throughout the novel and her religious superiors do little better. We hear nothing of the struggles of the interior life, which is where the drama of all nuns' stories really lies.
Thus, on the very day that Brigid is' accepted for the postulantship, all she can think of is how she has missed her chance with the boy with whom she has been long infatuated.
During her interview, Mother General had asked, apparentlY in all seriousness: "When did you last have a mystical 'experience. Two months ago? Or was it a fortnight? Or even this morning?... No messages from Our Lady or signs of the stigmata? This should give some notion of Newman's spiritual illiteracy.
As far as the reader can ascertain, all Brigid wants to do is get away from her working-class home and one can hardly blame her mother (as Newman seems to do) for
failing to take her seriously. Vocations, however, have been built on less promising material, but Brigid never progresses and remains in the same state of gauche stupidity throughout, scarcely noticing that towards the end of the novel she has slipped into a lesbian relationship with another nun.
It is not psychologically credible for a young girl to remain in such an intense environment for crucial years without it having any effect on her.
Yet Newman asks us to believe this of Brigid: she seems to have set out chiefly to shock and to titillate but by clinging so resolutely to the superficial, her novel remains merely wearisome and irritating.
KAREN ARMSTRONG