A private reckoning of life today

A Late Finding, a novel by Lucy Beckett (Gracewing, £20.00 / €24.00)

We seem to live in a time where Catholic culture has passed out of general public discourse, especially in fiction. The days of Fr Benson, Belloc, Chesterton, Waugh, Graham Greene and others are lost in the past.

Yet there must be a readership out there of people with a love of rereading, a true delight in the joys of fiction, but who find most of what is published inimical to them. Perhaps Lucy Beckett may be the answer to their needs, not to mention their prayers.

Lucy Beckett, we are told, is a novelist, historian and literary critic. She grew up in Yorkshire, was educated at Cambridge University, and with her husband, the musicologist John Warrack, has lived back in Yorkshire for nearly 50 years.

She taught for many years at Ampleforth College, and has written a number of books of different kinds. Her novels, however, though informed by her own life, are fictions.

She is best known for her historical novels, set in periods as different as the English Reformation, Weimar Germany, the borderlands of Poland and Russia in World War One, France during the years of the Algerian war: all places and times that present great challenges to Catholics.

In Grieving of Other Days she provides an account of her current leading character Clare Wilson during Covid days. One of her readers, by the way, commented that: “The passages describing the central character at Mass and at prayer, and her thoughts about her faith, are beautifully written and most moving.”

This new novel continues the life of Clare, a mingling of a Catholic consciousness with the actualities of the day.

Still affected by the loss of a child, Clare has just lost her oldest friend, but into this grim world there comes a new friendship with a man from the Balkans, and its recent war-torn life.

The novel comes with an encomium by Piers Paul Read, himself a writer that readers in Ireland should know more about. Though Lucy Beckett deals with some anguishing passages, she has also a great resilience founded in her faith which carries her through.

For a change of pace, and insight uncommon these days, Lucy Beckett is well worth seeking out.