Tale of a Cool, Catholic, English Cat

By Thomas Cullinan

The Roman Catholic of England is apt to be quite a cool cat. He has, quite often, a much more intellectual approach to his religion than his American cousins, with none of the beads-telling fervor of his Irish neighbors. He is inclined to be a bit casual about dogma and highly suspicious of ecclesiastical authority. He is a member of a proud minority the more so if he belongs to a preReformation family and that pride sometimes leads him down devious paths.

Such a Roman Catholic is Edward Dawson, hero of Piers Paul Read's new novel Monk Dawson (Lippincott; $5.95). We meet him as a gentle and bright boy who is packed off to Kirkham, an exclusive Catholic boarding school, at the age of 7-a practice common among the British upper classes, both Catholic and Protestant. Whether this early exile from home contributes to Dawson's later emotional difficulties Read doesn't tell us.

AND DAWSON has plenty of emotional and spiritual problems. He is never able to decide what to do with his life, whether to serve God or man. He grows to adolescence and young manhood, full of love that can find no satisfactory object, cursed by an idealism that can find no fulfillment in a competitive world.

Dawson is in trouble from his first days at the school. The monks at Kirkham are practical men who feel that charity is the business of other orders of the Church. Their mission is to educate future leaders of England who, by their positions in society, can advance the cause of Roman Catholicism. Dawson is a misfit, a potential St. Francis in a school for St. Peters and St. Pauls.

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DAWSON'S LOVE finds expression briefly in a homosexual attachment and then, persuaded of the evil of this,

he turns his energies to things spiritual. When he has completed his courses of study at Kirkham be decides to enter the nearby Benedictine monastery and become a monk like his teachers.

From the monastery he moves to the lay priesthood and is appointed to a London parish. Here for a time he finds peace of soul as he becomes a popular preacher, crusading for charity. He is a fountain of good works but without enough faith to sustain him and eventually he begins to feel again that his work is useless.

WE FOLLOW Edward Dawson down the hallway of his life as he tries one door after another. He becomes a writer on religious subjects, inveighing against hypocrisy in the Church and in English society, all the while terrified that he is the greatest hypocrite himself. Finally, in despair, he leaves the Church and takes up the excesses of the world, and finds himself contributing to the destruction of those he has been trying hardest to help.

Monk Dawson has received the highest praise in England, winning the Somerset Maugham Award and the Hawthornden Prize for 1970. The jacket of this edition carries an accolade from Graham Greene and this isn't surprising. It's a Graham Greene kind of novel the pursuer pursued as in Francis Thompson's poem, "The Hound of Heaven," and Read carries the theme off as well as Greene has ever done it.

In addition to being a penetrating study of Edward Dawson's life, this is an incisive summation of a branch of rootless, upper class British society. Edward Dawson is an absolutely fascinating character and Monk Dawson is a splendid and brilliant novel.

Piers Paul Read-