Be Near Me

By Andrew O'Hagan

The Canadian debut of the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Our Fathers and Mayflies.

In a small Scottish parish in a post-industrial town by the sea, an English priest with secrets in his own past becomes stalked by the fear of scandal, class hatred, and lost ideals.

When Father David Anderton takes over a Scottish parish, not everyone is ready to accept him. Over the spring and summer of 2003, Father David befriends two young, troubled students, Mark and Lisa. Their natural energy and response to the world bring out his own feelings of protectiveness, as well as longings for parts of himself—and his past—that he has come to lose. This relationship and the way it develops leads to the book’s climax, as Father David finds himself facing accusations of abuse.

Told from the point of view of Father David, we feel, beneath his need for order and emotional distance, the passionate undercurrents that have brought him to where he is. In this riveting novel, where every word counts, Andrew O’Hagan’s brilliant writing leads us into a story of art and politics, love and faith. Be Near Me possesses a depth of feeling and a literary artistry that render it O’Hagan’s masterpiece.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 11, 2010
• ISBN: 9781551994130

Andrew O'Hagan

ANDREW O'HAGAN was born in Glasgow, Scotland. His previous novels have been awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the E. M. Forster Award.

Reviews for Be Near Me

[sadiebabie · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I'll start with a positive - this book is incredibly well written. It flows, the prose is beautiful, the story is well-layered and develops at a steady pace. It is insightful, clever and deals with the subject matter in a non-sensationalist and balanced way.

Which is why it pained me to give it such a low rating...but I just can't see past the glaring flaw in this book. And that flaw is that it just wouldn't happen. Teenagers like Mark and Lisa wouldn't hang about with David in the way portrayed (use and take advantage of, yes, but not socialise), and someone like David (no matter how lonely he was or how deep his mid life crisis went) wouldn't have allowed himself to be in such a position with them. Their worlds were just too far apart, their ages too far apart...I just couldn't suspend my disbelief enough to engage with the story. That stopped this being a great read, in my opinion.

And don't even get me (native Scot) started on the anti-English stuff. Again, the author made it too extreme and trashed the believability.

[ficusfan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was another RL book group read. It was picked because the blurb intrigued us: Was it about a gay priest, and the spectre of sexual abuse or not.Unfortunately the book didn't really have much umph. The writing was vague and just didn't draw you in with the setting the characters, or the story. The POV, David Anderton, is a priest that has just been posted to a small rural Scottish parish. He is Scottish himself, but only by birth. He lived and was educated in England, so he is considered an outsider. Catholics are not really welcome and with his education and tastes (wine, music) he is considered posh as well. Those around him are working class, coarse and products of a popular culture he has used the priesthood to avoid. He has trouble adjusting to the place and its routine and how those under him have been able to do what they want.Unfortunately he is also having a mid-life crisis. He has lost or never had faith, and he is missing the life he was never allowed to have. Family, lovers, friends all the connections that we take for granted, he is fascinated by. He has incongruent exchanges with his feisty housekeeper, and he ends up being sucked in by two teenage delinquents he is supposed to be mentoring. Rather than being the adult or the positive role model, he becomes one of them, by allowing their swearing, stealing, drinking, drugging, and general escape from responsibility and conformity. He insulates himself from real life, and is unable to pull himself away from them. While spending time with them, he is skipping his work, and going through the motions of his life and responsibilities. David is also constantly thinking about the man he loved and lost (death) as a young man in College back in the 60s. It seems that he may have joined the priesthood to deal with his loss and his broken heart. He has also perhaps joined it because he is unable to deal with his homosexuality, and the fuss (1960) it would cause in the neat and tidy world he inhabits with his mother. He is trying to preserve his dignity, and may have given up his passion to do it.Of course he can only repress himself so long, and when he is plied with drink and drugs by a 15 year old boy, he slips. Publicity and a circus ensues.Interesting ideas and questions, but just not well executed for me. The last part of the book was better than the beginning. I just never felt the attraction that David did with the kids. He also had a good honest relationship with his mother, who had money. She would have supported him in both ways if he had wanted to give up the priesthood and re-design his life.At least if was short.

[tonysandel · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After moving to a new parish in Ayrshire, Father David Anderton is attracted to Mark McNulty, a rebellious 15-year-old. He starts to spend many hours with Mark and his girlfriend Lisa, neglecting his parish and condoning the young people's drinking, drug-taking, stealing and vandalism.

[oldblack-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I haven't yet finished this book but it's impossible for me to believe that it could end in any other way than one that would warrant 5 stars. I am completely convinced that any 'deficiencies' in the book are in my reading and understanding, rather than O'Hagan's writing. This is a deceptive book, in that you can read it superficially and think it's only so-so, and largely a discussion of working class poverty in Scotland, but the reality is, I believe, far from that. The very few occasions I looked a little further into the text revealed to me a much more subtle and deep meaning than I had gained from my initial reading. I suspect if I was a better read and better educated person, I would have appreciated the work even more than the 5-stars-worth that it has already been given. Even in my ignorance, I found it deeply moving and powerful, with direct relevance to my own life and people I know in a corner of the world very distant from that Scottish town.

[schopflin · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Andrew O'Hagan writes beautifully and some of his descriptions of narrow-minded parochial attitudes were painfully close to the bone. However, after a great couple of opening chapters I was disappointed with the novel. He captures the selfish, low-attention span of our teenage years brilliantly but actually, spending time with bored teenagers is boring. Somehow I lost any sense of engagement with the protagonist and remain baffled as to his motivations and unconvinced by the arc of the story. Hasn't put me off reading some more though! 'Personality' next.

[karlnarveson · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Middle-class arseholes from England, pardon my French. You think Scotland is a playground for shootin' and fishin'. You think it's all fucken kilts and haggises and crap like that.No, sir, we get the picture. It's a welfare slum. For a middle-aged priest to request a parish in a hellhole like Kilgarnock, Ayrshire, is a symptom or foreshadowing of the midlife crisis that next has him fatalistically yielding to an infatuation with a fifteen-year-old hoodlum whose only appeal is youth and good looks, which are harder to render on the printed page than the tedium of his conversation.

[dylanwolf · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I much admired this understated story of a naive, intellectual and effete catholic priest whose rural past ill-prepares him for the challenges of a new urban parish on the depressed Ayrshire coast. This is an intensely sad tragedy, achingly melancholic, where the protagonist Father David Atherton is poorly equipped to do little but accept his fate. The book is a deep search of a community turned in on itself and desperately seeking its own soul as well as a insightful examination of the relationship between different generations. Father Atherton begins to live out a life he never experienced as a youth through his connections with three local teenagers. He makes mistakes and his loss of faith and unsure sexuality lead him into dangerous territory. This is a book I very highly recommend.

[missizicks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I thought this book was incredible. From the very start, the prose pulled me into the main character's world. It struck me as being a meditation on what it actually involves to be human, to live a life that is frustrating, to try to find hope and a reason for your existence. It was interesting in its portrayal of a man using faith as a hiding place, and the crisis this brought about in his life because of the lack of honesty in his decision. The relationship between the main character and the teenagers who befriend him was well observed, the outcome unavoidable. And through it all O'Hagan's steady prose made the story believable.

[edwinbcn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Be near me will probably remain of of Andrew O'Hagan's best books. It is a book of tremendous depth, and not at all as obvious as it seems. In fact, the obscurity of what "it" is all about, is one of its main themes.The novel is difficult, and difficult to get into. The final chapters are much better and much more engaging that the first part of the book. The difficulty of the book lies in the fact that the main theme of failing sympathy and understanding is worked out in various dimensions and relations in the book, in age, class, material and spiritual wealth. The enormous differences lead to and produce an enormous clash, a collision of two spheres, two worlds colliding at full speed.In Be near me, religion is but a membrane that separate these two orbs. Even to the main character, David Anderton, a Roman Catholic priest, religion is but a thin veneer, a skin adopted or worn for fail of another, better choice. Anderton, as his name suggests, so different from others ('Ander' taken to mean different, in German), fails to adapt of be flexible, while others, in their later years at university shake off religion. Uncertainty, and hesitation to change, instead rather hold on to what is familiar characterized Anderton. In more than one sense, Anderton has not really outgrown his students days, or his ideals and past are hidden under a thin film.Assigned to a Parish in rural Scotland, an impoverished town, Anderton's "otherness" is heightened by the sharp contrast between his almost aristocratic background, his tastes and his intellectualism, which is all but barely accepted as he enjoys the protection of his status as a priest. He enjoys most understanding from his housekeeper, Mrs Poole, who sees his refinement close up. Until one day, she sees too much.Anderton's demise comes through the unlikely friendship he makes with two teenagers; they symbolize his inability to see the world as it is, as he tries to understand them, and be close to them. As he smokes pott with young Mark, his judgement is blurred and he gives himself over to feeling which were buried for decades.Nothing much happened, but it looks very wrong, and is not understood. The hatred of the local population comes full down on Anderton, and everything he ever loved is smashed.The anger of the parishioners in the novel is echoed by the anger of some readers. Particularly since 2006, when Be near me, the number of news stories about abuse in the church has increased. The novel is no apology, but an intellectual interpretation, an exploration of different, possible perspectives.Very impressive.

[gocam_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Affecting, ambiguous, deeply unsettling, thoughtful and sad, 'Be Near Me' manages to resolve to a conclusion optimistic and somehow cathartic - quite a trick to pull given the intensity, charge and sheer impropriety of the subject matter. Set in a highly polarised, xenophobic yet in other ways tight- knit Scottish community, we follow the trials of a Catholic outsider priest as he attempts to integrate and engage with his charge. While observing those around him and in turn being perceived (often with harsh cynism & cruelty) he starts to ruminate on his own life viewed through a newly introspective lens, questioning how religion, family & experiences have led him to this remote hamlet. Instrumental in sparking this enlightenment are a trio of teenagers with whom he becomes dangerously and unprofessionally involved, living vicariously through their experiences as a proxy for a youth that he never truly enjoyed. The housekeeper to the manse he calls home wields a moral foil and acts as intellectual sparring partner as our priest starts to question his beliefs and lose his ethical bearings.This is a tremendously well-written novel that engages on many levels - we question and ponder issues of guilt, morality, memory, grief, compassion and redemption as the arcs resolve, so that by the end as readers we are left satisfied yet deeply affected. Highly recommended.

[bibliobibuli_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Andrew O'Hagan's Booker longlisted Be Near Me is one of those novels stories where you can see disaster looming for the protagonist a long way off, and feel like shouting him a warning. (But would he have listened? Would he have cared?)Like Zoe Heller's excellent Notes from a Scandal, the novel takes as its territory the human story behind familiar tabloid headlines (in this case screaming about a paedophile Roman Catholic priest).Father David Anderton becomes the parish priest for Dalgarnock, a small town in Ayrshire, Scotland. He's a fish out of water (Oxford educated, middle-class) in a former industrial town with high-unemployment rates and sectarian divisions as clear-cut as those in Ulster, across the water.He befriends a group of loutish teens from the local school, and becomes a de facto member of the gang, smoking dope, popping E's, drinking, hanging out. He is particularly drawn to a boy called Mark, whom he kisses (and no more) after a night on a bender. The boy tells his father who then blows the whistle, and soon the the whole community is baying for his blood.I could appreciate O'Hagan's depiction of the teenagers, having taught classes just like this!:"The pupils were waiting in World Religions. they hung over their desks as if they had just been dropped from a great height, looking like their limbs confounded them and their hair bothered them chewed the frayed ends of their sweaters in the style of caged animals attempting to escape their own quarters. They tended to wear uniform, though each pupil had customized it with badges and belts and sweatbands, you felt they had applied strict notions of themselves to the tying of their ties and the sticking up of their shirt collars. the small energies of disdain could be observed in all this, and the classroom fairly jingled with the sound of forbidden rings and bracelets."David Anderton is a more difficult character to work out, since we are only gradually permitted to piece together his past. I didn't find him easy to sympathize with - he lacks conviction in his calling, he comes across as weak and ineffectual and simply to be going through the motions of running his parish.It is a bit of a stretch that a parish priest should be so attracted to a group of yobbish teens that in some senses he seeks to emulate them, but O'Hagan does make the relationship seem credible ... and even inevitable.Father David is attracted to the teenagers, and particularly to Mark, for their exuberance and their certainty (even when wrong-headed) and perhaps too for their sheer recklessness which contrast with his own lack of conviction and inertia. He clearly takes pleasure in experiencing life vicariously through them.The title of the book is a line from Tennyson's In Memoriam and, as Hilary Mantel says, (reviewing the book in the Guardian) it is a prayer whispered by this celibate priest on all those lonely nights, still longing for the lover who was killed in a car accident decades before. It's a blow Father David hasn't recovered from. A sense of loss permeates the novel.And the novel is a tragedy in the way a Shakespearian play is a tragedy - the ending is inevitable given the flawed character of the protagonist. But if you enjoy the kind of contemporary British literary fiction which finds its way onto Booker shortlists and longlists, you should find the novel extremely rewarding.I did enjoy it very much because I so admired O'Hagan's craft: he writes beautifully (although some reviewers have felt that he rather overwrites) and I relished the language. Scenes were so vividly rendered, that I was watching the movie in my head. (British. Arty. Slow.) I also really liked Mrs. Poole the housekeeper whom I felt was particularly well-drawn.

[posthumose · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A deeply touching story, beautifully written. A young English priest is accused of molesting a troubled boy he has been trying to help. He does not defend himself with any of the perceived vigour that an innocent man might. This tears it for everyone in the Scottish town he's been assigned to. But he is willing to suffer the presumptions and consequences for his own private reasons. The book is about loving and being honest about it. Powerful. A Booker Prize winning novel.

[bobbieharv · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I thought I would like this more than I did. How this priest became attracted to this group of unlikely, unlikeable, delinquent teenagers was not really well explained.

[deargreenplace · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

David Anderton is a connoisseur of fine food, wine and classical music. He attended Ampleforth public school, studied at Oxford University, and lived in Rome. His father died when he was younger, and his mother is a Morningside lady (a well-to-do area in Edinburgh) who writes novels. He is erudite, thoughtful and intelligent. David Anderton is a Catholic priest.Father David is working in Dalgarnock, a fictitious town in Ayrshire, Scotland. Many of the parishioners are unemployed, having lost their manufacturing jobs as the local factories closed down. He has a comfortable rectory at St John Ogilvie, and is assisted by his housekeeper, Mrs Poole. Part of his role involves working with pupils at the local secondary school, St Andrew's, and it is here that he meets Mark and Lisa, who take an interest in Father David. A strange friendship grows between the three, as they exchange text messages, and start wandering at night, exploring the industrial estates and wastegrounds of Dalgarnock, where there is little for teenagers to do except numb the boredom with whatever mischief and substances they can find.It has been claimed that the author has based his Dalgarnock on the real town of Girvan in Ayrshire, (see Sunday Herald article), but my sister and I disagree. We attended St Andrew's Academy (Saltcoats), where you can see the island of Ailsa Craig from the classrooms, we lived in Kilwinning (home of the Mother Lodge of the Orange Order, and an abbey) and in Stevenston (home of the Ardeer club, ICI factory, and the Blue Star garage, which is a name known to locals but not the one on the sign outside). The author has an authentic insider's knowledge of the Three Towns area, and describes it in detail. As teenagers in Stevenston, my sister and I had friends much like Mark and Lisa, and the author's portrayal of these aimless teenagers and the ways they pass their time definitely ring true.Back to the plot though. It soon becomes apparent that Father David's friendship with Mark and Lisa is ill-advised, though he has been too naive to see this. Having spent a life distracted by art and wine and intellectualism (and a little religion), he is not equipped to recognise manipulation, or to consider how others perceive him and his actions.Much is made in the book about the differences between Father David's life and the lives of his parishioners. The author writes in great detail about the family lives of Mrs Poole, and Mark, as though he has known people like these. I have known people like these. It is not that the author is simply using the other characters as a contrast to Father David. While social class could be argued as a factor in the way that the book's events are played out, I didn't believe that this was a book about class. For me, this is a heartbreaking and wonderful book about loss, regret and mourning of the path not taken.Father David is written as a sympathetic character - naive, but essentially well-meaning. We learn about his student days at Oxford at the height of political activism in the 1960s, his friendship with the 'Marcellists', a group of Proust followers, and about the tragic events which lead him to decide to join the priesthood. The priest chooses faith in God as a safety net against the pain and loss of loving, and it is his gradual realisation of this I think, that makes the book so tragic. His relative lack of experience in close relationships leaves him vulnerable. This is a warm, thoughtful and true to life story, and would have received 5 stars if I hadn't been so upset at the end.

[stillatim · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

No surprises, no entirely lovable characters, no theoretical pyrotechnics... ah. Like a nice shower at the end of the day. O'Hagan's writing reaches near Anthony Powell levels of wonderful, he's even-handed on a topic which must tempt almost everyone to religious-right or radical-left levels of hyperbole, his characters lodge in your mind, and, I confess, he basically deals with issues that are extremely important to me: how do you combine the wish for equality and justice with a belief in the absolute importance of high culture? Yes, I too am both a Marcellist and a Bombastic. And I think most interesting people are. So this is not only deeply affecting, but pretty powerful intellectually. Maybe one day I'll up it to five stars, although the trite 'love will conquer all' 'the personal is the political' stuff kind of itches my craw.