Easter

Arditti, who structures his novel in three sections--the last being a working of the events of the first from different angles--often writes with wittily shrewd and observant precision. Someone speaks with "tweed-skirted diction"; a dying man watches the words of a prayer "fly about the room like humming-birds"; and the bishop's PA tartly initiates a visitor into canon biscuit law--"Chocolates are for suffragans, bourbons for archdeacons. Vicars and curates get rich tea". --Susan Elkin

Reader Reviews:

Easter by Michael Arditti (2/2 people found this helpful)

Easter is a book about events at an Anglican parish in suburban London in Holy Week. It's not an easy book to get into, as it is divided into three different parts, which tell the story from different viewpoints, and moves from one dialogue or stream of consciousness to the next without introducing the characters; I found I often had to look up names in the list of characters at the beginning of the book, and I got confused at times about the sequence of events. This structure makes the book intriguing to read though. I liked the way the author intersperses dialogues, thoughts etc. with formal descriptions of liturgical and other happenings ("The Curate leads the donkey around the church. It takes fright at the cloud of incense and defecates by the font").
I got somewhat irritated by the schematic and very politically correct classification of characters. Most of the good parts are reserved for homosexual and HIV-positive characters with alternative life styles, and the people with more conventional roles or beliefs come off rather badly. The book includes wild charicatures of an evangelical bishop and a repressed homosexual Anglo-Catholic Archdeacon indulging in bizarre masochistic practices.
If you're not turned off by the rather one-sided ideological viewpoint, you'll find this book an interesting, serious exploration of religious themes in modern life. I enjoyed it.

Oliver, the peace-bringer (1/1 people found this helpful)

The circumstances of the encounter between the "hero" of the book - the gay curate Blair Ashley - with his new lover Oliver are anything but romantic. Gay cliché, all right, but very close to reality!

Very close indeed, as far as I am concerned. A few month prior to reading the book (which I enjoyed tremendously!), I met my Olivier in a parc of Brussels, very similar to the surroundings described in the book, and since - me being an active catholic and gay (not always a very easy thing to be!) - I have a strong tendency to put things that happen to me and around me in a biblical/theological context, I immediately thought of the branch of an olive tree, that announced the end of the big flood and the reconciliation between God and humanity ....

I told a colleague .... By chance, she bought the book - for the cover, as she admits. Then she told me, that I should read it too. And so I did. - It was like in the song: Singing my life with his song, killing me softly .... with his book!

As a catholic, it was easy to read about shortcomings of the Anglican church. However, everything that the book speaks about is also very much true about the catholic church.

Michael Arditti, thank you very much for this book. You did incarnation the other way round: - in your book, a very important part of my life, of my flesh, if you want, has become word!

An Essential Wake-Up Call For Organised Religion (9/11 people found this helpful)

An initially awkward and caricatured introduction to the characters in this novel put me on my gueard. However, Arditti manages to strip away the fuzziness of fiction and convey real feelings, real prejudices and real hopes so sweetly and resonantly that I was left breathless. A cleverly structured book, it lives far beyond the hype and ensures both an entertaining read as well as a sharp critique of the role of faith in society today. It is a juxtaposition of the traditional and staid against the vibrant and cherished and forced me to confront my well-set ideals of religion.
Easter views the Establishment from inside and out, as the author gazes on society equally perceptively through the eyes of the "freak on the fringes" and the "pillar of society", illuminating, provoking and extolling us to confront the dead wood of our attitudes, to open the door to those forced to the fringes by 19th century ideals and to re-discover the freedom and liberation of a faith based on love, that celebrates the diversity of life, not condemns it.

An excellent book, which people should read. (1/1 people found this helpful)

I am currently doing a religious studies A-level, and I found this book to be not only very helpful, but also enjoyable in it's discussion of the issues. I would recommend it to anyone as a powerful read, sometimes funny, sometimes depressing, but always enlightening. One of my favorite books of the year!

A SUPERB BOOK (1/1 people found this helpful)

'Michael Arditti's Easter is a revelation. It's no more a book for one season than Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Nor is it a book just for Christians or people who go to church. What Arditti does so brilliantly is to explore the place of God in the world. Easter is full of doubts and questions, as when the Vicar asks in one of the wonderful passages, if it is 'God who has abandoned us or we who have abandoned Him? Is He dead, as Nietzsche claimed, or merely locked up on trumped-up charges on Devil's Island?' It makes you think more than any novel I have read for years but, at the same time, it offers up answers. It doesn't take a fashionable, post-modern view that all truths are equally valid but proposes a radical theological framework, that is itself a message of hope.

But Easter isn't heavy or a tract. The Church settings are a rich source of comedy. Arditti is wonderful with animals - from the recalcitrant donkey who

misbehaves by the font at the Palm Sunday service through an aristocratic lady's pet parrot which interrupts a funeral service at a most inopportune moment. His deeply moving portrayal of Cherish, an African girl with AIDS, shows that he has lost none of the skill he showed in Pagan and her Parents for depicting children. As for the marvellously drawn gallery of adult characters, it is hard to know which to pick out. My own favourites are Lyndon Brooks, a neurotic adolescent with an overheated imagination and a unique line in seduction techniques; Jessica Grieve, the Vicar's wife who bashes a verger on the head at a demonstration, shouting 'Down with Oppressors everywhere'; Trudy England, the Holocaust survivor who is haunted by nightmares of Hitler's moustache 'like a spider on her pillow'; Massimo, an Italian nurse, determined to challenge English peoples' 'insular conviction that Deviance is the capital of Abroad'; and, of course, Queen Elizabeth II, frugally making a Callard and Bowser buttersotch sweet last the journey from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey and trying to ignore her husband's tone-deaf humming from Fiddler on the Roof. But there are so many other characters equally worthy of mention in a novel that, for scope - and achievement - can only be compared with one of the great Russian nineteeth century books.

Easter is a big book, but there are felicities of thought and expression on every page. Read it for its comedy; read it for its poignance; read it for its philosophical insights; read it for its technical skill. Only read it... you won't regret it.

Michael Arditti

Editorial Review: