Villains in the Vatican... again

Curial officials are the new KGB, says David McLaurin
Papal Whispers by Stephen Cartmell, The Book Guild £15.99
THIS NOVEL is trumpeted as an important new addition to the corpus of Vatican thrillers. This genre — Morris West is its most famous exponent — is something of an oddity in the modern literary scene. One imagines that the Vatican in real life affords no more thrilling scenes than elderly clerics gathering over te al 1 imone, or Cardinal Ratzinger settling down with a novel by Barbara Cartland after a particularly satisfying dish of spaghetti; but real life has never thwarted the feverish imagination of the novelist for long. What lies behind the portone di bronzo being relatively obscure, fantasy can run riot. Sub-Saharan Africa and outer space have all been explored; only the Holy See remains largely undiscovered.
The antecedents of the genre lie in those weighty novels about early Christianity, whose success lay in the intoxicating combination of piety, pseudohistory and High Camp, leav
ened by a generous dash of sex. The attempted rape scene in Quo Vadis is one of the most shocking things I have ever read; presumably the author got away with it because it was hidden away in what is supposed to be a holy book. Religious sentiment, as Quo Vadis, Ben Hur and The Robe show, sugars the pill every time.
Such saccharine would not shift many copies nowadays. In fact, quite the opposite: and here, of course, we have David Yallop to thank. Mr Yallop has created a fictional Vatican peopled with scoundrels worthy of the worst excesses of the Black Legend. Curial officials are now filling that void in fiction left vacant by the demise of the KGB.
Stephen Cartmell gives us a delightfully villainous Cardinal, and pushes forward his conspiracy theory with considerable narrative drive. He fails at the end to pull a truly astonishing white rabbit out of his hat: his finale leaves off where certain recent Hollywood blockbusters begin. But his Vatican, humming with intrigue, is certainly more interesting than the real thing.