What do you think?
Rate this book
Easter
Arditti's novel is both a devastating portrait of today's Church of England and an audatious reworking of the central myth of Western culture.
391 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
2 people are currently reading
88 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
April 5, 2015
I hadn’t heard of Michael Arditti before I reviewed his novel
The Breath of Night
– a taut, Heart of Darkness-inspired thriller about a young man searching for a missing priest in the Philippines – for Third Way magazine in late 2013. He deserves to be better known. Easter (2000), his third novel, earned him comparisons to Iris Murdoch and Barbara Pym. His nuanced picture of modern Christianity, especially the Anglican Church, is spot-on.
Part One traces the week between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday in a fictional London parish, St Mary-in-the-Vale, Hampstead. Structured around the services of Holy Week and punctuated with bits of liturgy, the novel moves between the close third-person perspectives of various clergy and parishioners. Huxley Grieve, the vicar, is – rather inconveniently – experiencing serious doubts in this week of all weeks. And this at a time when the new Bishop of London, Ted Bishop (“Bishop by name, bishop by calling,” he quips), has announced his mission to root out the poison of liberalism from the Church.
I was frequently reminded of a cross between Susan Howatch and David Lodge (especially in How Far Can You Go?), with a dash of the BBC comedy Rev thrown in. Reverend Grieve’s sermons may be achingly earnest, but the novel is also very funny indeed, thanks in part to the large ensemble cast. Here’s a passage, almost like a set of stage directions, from the first Palm Sunday service: “The procession moves up the nave. The Curate leads the donkey around the church. It takes fright at the cloud of incense and defecates by the font.”
Part Two takes a different direction, re-envisioning the Passion narrative – especially the Garden, arrest and trial – through the experiences of the homosexual curate, Blair Ashley. I liked this more intimate, first-person rendering of the Easter story (and the twisted Midsummer Night’s Dream references), but was unconvinced by the strategy of Part Three, which repeats the same Easter week, revealing a few more details and perspectives. When I saw the service list, I assumed it would be the view a year later, showing what had changed in the interim. Inevitably, this final section ends up feeling a bit repetitive.
Had I not looked at the copyright page, I would have assumed this was written in the late 1980s because it so spotlights AIDS and feminist consciousness-raising. In this respect, it feels dated – unless Arditti is trying to show how the Church is often 10–15 years behind secular society: “the Church has been the most anti-gay influence throughout the ages,” a minor character objects. Blair speaks up in defense: “The Church has been the most anti-everything influence. That’s not a reason for giving up on it.” Arditti clearly feels that modern Christianity is worth saving, despite all its foibles; I highly recommend his books.
(Included in a list of recommended Easter reading on my blog.)
A few more favorite quotes:
Rev. Grieve surveys his audience: “He looks at the gloomy picture…and entitles it ‘Study in brown hats and blue rinses’. He does not ask for a larger congregation – he has long lost faith in miracles – simply a more representative one.”
“It’s imperative that we don’t endorse the mentality of our secular world which appears to regard every death as an affront and early death as a failure.”
“Faith can never be a fait accompli. Anyone who follows Christ will have doubts. After all, He did. To live in total certainty seems to me to be the definition of madness.”
Related reading:
• England, England by Julian Barnes
• The Rev Diaries
• In One Person by John Irving is similarly sex-saturated
• The Great Night by Chris Adrian also tweaks A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Part One traces the week between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday in a fictional London parish, St Mary-in-the-Vale, Hampstead. Structured around the services of Holy Week and punctuated with bits of liturgy, the novel moves between the close third-person perspectives of various clergy and parishioners. Huxley Grieve, the vicar, is – rather inconveniently – experiencing serious doubts in this week of all weeks. And this at a time when the new Bishop of London, Ted Bishop (“Bishop by name, bishop by calling,” he quips), has announced his mission to root out the poison of liberalism from the Church.
I was frequently reminded of a cross between Susan Howatch and David Lodge (especially in How Far Can You Go?), with a dash of the BBC comedy Rev thrown in. Reverend Grieve’s sermons may be achingly earnest, but the novel is also very funny indeed, thanks in part to the large ensemble cast. Here’s a passage, almost like a set of stage directions, from the first Palm Sunday service: “The procession moves up the nave. The Curate leads the donkey around the church. It takes fright at the cloud of incense and defecates by the font.”
Part Two takes a different direction, re-envisioning the Passion narrative – especially the Garden, arrest and trial – through the experiences of the homosexual curate, Blair Ashley. I liked this more intimate, first-person rendering of the Easter story (and the twisted Midsummer Night’s Dream references), but was unconvinced by the strategy of Part Three, which repeats the same Easter week, revealing a few more details and perspectives. When I saw the service list, I assumed it would be the view a year later, showing what had changed in the interim. Inevitably, this final section ends up feeling a bit repetitive.
Had I not looked at the copyright page, I would have assumed this was written in the late 1980s because it so spotlights AIDS and feminist consciousness-raising. In this respect, it feels dated – unless Arditti is trying to show how the Church is often 10–15 years behind secular society: “the Church has been the most anti-gay influence throughout the ages,” a minor character objects. Blair speaks up in defense: “The Church has been the most anti-everything influence. That’s not a reason for giving up on it.” Arditti clearly feels that modern Christianity is worth saving, despite all its foibles; I highly recommend his books.
(Included in a list of recommended Easter reading on my blog.)
A few more favorite quotes:
Rev. Grieve surveys his audience: “He looks at the gloomy picture…and entitles it ‘Study in brown hats and blue rinses’. He does not ask for a larger congregation – he has long lost faith in miracles – simply a more representative one.”
“It’s imperative that we don’t endorse the mentality of our secular world which appears to regard every death as an affront and early death as a failure.”
“Faith can never be a fait accompli. Anyone who follows Christ will have doubts. After all, He did. To live in total certainty seems to me to be the definition of madness.”
Related reading:
• England, England by Julian Barnes
• The Rev Diaries
• In One Person by John Irving is similarly sex-saturated
• The Great Night by Chris Adrian also tweaks A Midsummer Night’s Dream
May 18, 2017
I really had to force myself to read this (and I only got to about 15% by the time of the book club meetup to discuss it) but I am sort of glad I did. Arditti decided that there aren't enough novels about the Church of England so wrote one set in Hampstead consisting of a bewilderingly large cast of relatable people, caricatures and sitcom characters who find themselves in relatable situations, cliched situations, and ridiculously comedic situations.
The first third is extremely hard to follow and unrewarding, except for a handful of moving sections which don't make up for the disturbing parts. The second third, which switches to a first person voice and a more conventional style, demonstrated that Arditti is probably a rather good writer. The third third (yes) was more satisfying because by that point I had pretty much got on top of what was going on and who I could just ignore. The non-linear structure was clever, but I could have done without the fact that so much of my reading experience had pieces missing. The random (or not so random, I suppose) theological and philosophical conversations were pretty interesting, although stylistically shoehorned in.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is a bad book, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
The first third is extremely hard to follow and unrewarding, except for a handful of moving sections which don't make up for the disturbing parts. The second third, which switches to a first person voice and a more conventional style, demonstrated that Arditti is probably a rather good writer. The third third (yes) was more satisfying because by that point I had pretty much got on top of what was going on and who I could just ignore. The non-linear structure was clever, but I could have done without the fact that so much of my reading experience had pieces missing. The random (or not so random, I suppose) theological and philosophical conversations were pretty interesting, although stylistically shoehorned in.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is a bad book, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
May 24, 2010
A difficult, rewarding novel whose flaws are as interesting as its strengths. Set in a London high church parish of the Church of England, it has a most interesting, apt structure. It doesn't really have chapters; it's structured by the services--including a funeral, a wedding, and a baptism--held in that parish during Holy Week. Then each of those "services" is divided by sort of stage directions describing a particular liturgical action (the vicar announces the hymn; the parishioners move to the 6th Station of the Cross, etc.), followed by the wandering thoughts at that point in time by one or more of the parishioners. That's where one of the difficulties arises. Because these reflections are mostly pretty short, don't convey a lot of action, and involve a large cast of characters, it's hard to keep everybody straight, even with a cast list in the front. We move through Holy Week with these parishioners; then there's a 50-page narrative in the center describing the travails of the curate; then we start over again at the beginning of the week and see the services again in light of those events. It doesn't sound like there's enough here to carry the action, but, perhaps surprisingly, it actually works pretty well. Overall, in large part, it's an apologia for liberal religion--with perhaps an excessive focus on the issue of homosexuality--and this is another problem: At first, the author seemed to be taking a lot of cheap shots at easy targets, and that remained something of a problem, but it did get more complex and subtle, too. All in all, a most rewarding book that I'd recommend highly to the right sort of reader--neither the unreflectively pious nor those indifferent to religion, but to those inquisitive about religion and the church and the redemptive force of its beliefs, rituals, and other activities.
November 5, 2018
This is one of my favourite books of all time. What's it about? Celebrating Easter in a church in Hampstead is not right. It's about nearly everything - the serious and the less so mixed in together. Love, loss, race, sex, sexuality, dying, grief, greed... all human life crammed into a Passion Play. Serious theological reflection, and characters who show the factions and tendencies in the Church of England with wit and seriousness. It's just astonishing how much is packed in, and how we see characters descend into a hell only to rise again, as it were.
Read
October 19, 2025In Easter, the topsy-turvy kingdom of God is brought to bear on the Church of England—or at least to one north London parish. Those who stand for the church’s “traditional values” are exposed as lifeless hypocrites, while those who dare to demonstrate a new way are depicted as yet-imperfect-but-powerful images of Christ. This motley crew includes an idealistic curate in a feud with the Queen, a lesbian couple getting hitched under subterfuge, a young acolyte exploring his sexuality with all the melodrama of adolescence, and a vicar who no longer believes the gospel he preaches. These and others—yes, there are plenty characters—all journey together through the liturgies of Holy Week, while the mysteries of death and resurrection unfold in each of their lives.
Arditti’s prose is at times luminous and at others overwrought. Under the first category falls the novel’s center-piece, an enchanting 60-page frenzy. In the rest of the book, his symbolism, though effective, often feels a bit heavy-handed. Despite this, the novel still has a great effect, partly due to its excellent pacing as the latter half of the book fills in the gaps left by the first.
Beyond its literary merit, Easter had an emotional impact for me. It renewed my confidence in God’s love for those who live outside the church’s good graces, and reminded me that that love is a real love, not merely a concept. It has consequences.
Arditti’s prose is at times luminous and at others overwrought. Under the first category falls the novel’s center-piece, an enchanting 60-page frenzy. In the rest of the book, his symbolism, though effective, often feels a bit heavy-handed. Despite this, the novel still has a great effect, partly due to its excellent pacing as the latter half of the book fills in the gaps left by the first.
Beyond its literary merit, Easter had an emotional impact for me. It renewed my confidence in God’s love for those who live outside the church’s good graces, and reminded me that that love is a real love, not merely a concept. It has consequences.
September 3, 2016
A tryptic story set in a high CofE church during holy week with a vicar who has lost faith, a gay curate, and a complete mish-mash of the usual crazy congregation.
In some places this is an excellent cyncical and snide commentary on the freakish nature of church communities. In these points it is very funny and well-written; captivating the full variety of human life and society.
At other times, however, the homosexuality is pushed too way too far. Parts of the middle section are really rather hard-core in the graphic description.
Ultimately the book is about living with others and finding forgiveness and community in common; about finding faith in a God who is above our petty human differences. In this regard the author does well; but I can't help but think he has pushed the boundaries a little far in his quest to achieve that goal.
In some places this is an excellent cyncical and snide commentary on the freakish nature of church communities. In these points it is very funny and well-written; captivating the full variety of human life and society.
At other times, however, the homosexuality is pushed too way too far. Parts of the middle section are really rather hard-core in the graphic description.
Ultimately the book is about living with others and finding forgiveness and community in common; about finding faith in a God who is above our petty human differences. In this regard the author does well; but I can't help but think he has pushed the boundaries a little far in his quest to achieve that goal.
May 10, 2010
Follows the Good Friday and Easter liturgy of the Church of England in a parish in Hampstead to tell the story of the vicar and his curate, less so of the bishop and archdeacon and laity of the parish. Michael Arditti's themes of religion and the problem of suffering, the relationship of the arts to religion, homosexuality and other factors giving people the sense of being outsiders, and the nature of fellowship are very much to the fore. I found the chronology a little confusing but all his books so far make good reads.
December 10, 2009
I ordered this from the library after Ian McKellen recommended it in TIME magazine.
Excellent move on my part.
It's a wonderful triptych that explores issues of sexuality and faith (in the context of the contemporary Church of England) with delicacy and fervor. I feel as if my soul is lifted by it -- how often can you say that. And I'm also filled with laughter; there's a good deal of dry, absurdist humor to be found here. I plan on reading more Arditti as soon as I can.
Excellent move on my part.
It's a wonderful triptych that explores issues of sexuality and faith (in the context of the contemporary Church of England) with delicacy and fervor. I feel as if my soul is lifted by it -- how often can you say that. And I'm also filled with laughter; there's a good deal of dry, absurdist humor to be found here. I plan on reading more Arditti as soon as I can.
March 17, 2015
This is a very rich book probably best appreciated by those with exposure to higher church Anglican liturgy. It is extremely funny and outrageous at times. There are brilliant one liners but there are also serious theological explorations. There is a large cast of characters that make it difficult to follow at times. However, the cast of characters is no larger than you would find in life in a smallish parish. I am sure that it will pay re-reading. Perhaps then I may give it five stars!
August 26, 2011
Technically creative. Sensationalist, salacious and at times simply sordid. It offers a simplistic liberal idea of goodies and baddies in the current Church of England fracas re sexuality and the use of the AIDS motif is a little obvious. But it does raise interesting questions re the contemporary relevance of Christ's passion and resurrection.
Want to read
November 8, 2009Recommended by Sir Ian McKellen in TIME.
Read
July 30, 2011I'm glad I read this a 2nd time. It helped put the pieces in place far more than it did a few years ago.
September 11, 2011
Not a book for the easily offended, I mistakenly gave this book to my mother, she was upset to have received such a "pornographic" book.
September 23, 2013
An personal all-time favourite! Wonderful characters, fantastic descriptions of life, utterly spellbinding!
May 4, 2014
Did not get on with this book at all. I gave up half-way, which I rarely do. Too many characters, most of whom are left insufficiently explored for you to remember them 5 pages later.
November 15, 2020
Read 70 pages then gave up. Maybe it's the mood I'm in as it's certainly well written and obviously a clever writer. I found it such a slog that I gave up.
April 26, 2017
I really enjoyed this book which is annoying because I was so prepared to hate it. It was funny, touching and very well written. It did suffer from an excess of characters and storylines, 4 or 5 of which should have been stripped back to let the more affecting stories shine through. Richly written, a pleasure to read.
April 30, 2017
So it is kind of hard for me to decide if I like this book or not. I have read it quite quickly because I was fascinated by the world depicted by Arditti which is quite sinister. Few of his characters are likeable, there is a perversion to it, a sense of unease but as Stendhal says in Le Rouge et le noir : "Eh, monsieur, un roman est un miroir qui se promène sur une grande route. Tantôt il reflète à vos yeux l'azur des cieux, tantôt la fange des bourbiers de la route. Et l'homme qui porte le miroir dans sa hotte sera par vous accusé d'être immoral! Son miroir montre la fange, et vous accusez le miroir! Accusez bien plutôt le grand chemin où est le bourbier, et plus encore l'inspecteur des routes qui laisse l'eau croupir et le bourbier se former." I was fascinated by this perversion .
Also I relate to Huxley and his lost of his faith. I went to so many things which are making me doubts and I echo the doubts of several characters : If there is a God why does He make suffer ? As Blair or Huxley I want to shout "my God, my God ! Why have you forsaken me ?"
I fond Arditti's writing sometimes hard, sometimes funny, his metaphors powerful and a sense of despair behind it . I'm going to give it a five stars because I believe literature is supposed to make you feel uneasy sometimes.
Also I relate to Huxley and his lost of his faith. I went to so many things which are making me doubts and I echo the doubts of several characters : If there is a God why does He make suffer ? As Blair or Huxley I want to shout "my God, my God ! Why have you forsaken me ?"
I fond Arditti's writing sometimes hard, sometimes funny, his metaphors powerful and a sense of despair behind it . I'm going to give it a five stars because I believe literature is supposed to make you feel uneasy sometimes.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews