Jerusalem, Jerusalem!
By Chilton Williamson Jr, Chronicle, £20
If you are a Catholic novelist writing today, how do you suggest a world where faith matters, without being self-conscious or appearing to proselytise? This is the question all Catholic writers must ask themselves. You can’t set aside your faith for the sake of fiction, yet you don’t want to invent a world foreign to most readers.
Williamson has succeeded in creating a society where belief in God is still credible, underpinning all the peccadilloes and larger sins that his characters demonstrate in their behaviour. Perhaps it helps that the author is from America, where religious belief is still taken seriously, and that his fictitious world is a coal town in Wyoming, where ranchers, cattle rustling, extreme weather and generous amounts of alcohol form the background to people’s lives.
