Altar Steps

by Compton Mackenzie

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336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

Compton Mackenzie was born into a theatrical family. His father, Edward Compton, was an actor and theatre company manager; his sister, Fay Compton, starred in many of James M. Barrie's plays, including Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. He was educated at St Paul's School and Magdalen College, Oxford where he obtained a degree in Modern History.

Mackenzie was married three times and aside from his writing also worked as an actor, political activist, and broadcaster. He served with British Intelligence in the Eastern Mediterranean during World War I, later publishing four books on his experiences. Compton Mackenzie was from 1920–1923 Tenant of Herm and Jethou and he shares many similarities to the central character in D.H. Lawrence's short story The Man Who Loved Islands, despite Lawrence saying "the man is no more he than I am." Mackenzie at first asked Secker, who published both authors, not to print the story and it was left out of one collection.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very baggy, slow, earnest story of a boy who wants to become a priest. I love Sinister Street, which like this is a baggy and earnest coming-of-age story, but while Mackenzie is still an excellent sentence-level writer with a really startling understanding of childhood, once our hero reaches adolescence he just doesn't have enough to do here. I think the issue is that without school—our hero doesn't take an Oxford scholarship that's offered to him, which allows Mackenzie to avoid setting another novel in an English university in the early 1900s—there aren't enough characters for him to meet to create the atmosphere that makes Sinister Street so pleasant, of people with very particular understandings of life lurking round every corner to influence our hero and induct him into some new facet of Edwardian life.

Instead he wanders slowly from parish to parish, meeting at each place a parson who is different from the last but not so different. (I am jealous, of course, of the way he can wander like this into an empty church and find himself invited to lunch by a random clergyman over and over.)

The intensity of Sinister Street, that intensity of being young and convicted of your own importance and the importance of the life of the mind, isn't felt here, even though there are people who believe things just as strongly. As a result the overlong letters and lecture-y dialogue feel overlong and like lectures—it's like Sinister Street under fluorescent lights, with no shadows or warmth to create the effect. As in all Mackenzie's novels that I've read it's fascinating to learn about these big prewar controversies (in this case ritualists vs latitudinarians in the C of E) from a novel that believes you already know much more about them than you do, but with so much less in the way of character and incident and surprise that's really the only thing you get from The Altar Steps.

Connects in a couple of places with the Sinister Street novels, which of course I love as a Pallister/Barchester fan. (Just side characters, notably Pauline, passing through.) Still planning to read the other two books in this series, but there's unfortunately no good Gutenberg edition of either one.

[Heath · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as good a novel as the author's "Sinister Street," but far more enjoyable. A reasonably light and speedy story of a young man of the English Church's high party at the end of the nineteenth century. With the exception of the protagonists, few of the characters are well-developed: there is a superfluity of wicked Protestant bishops, effective and godly Ritualist slum priests, abbots who are very bad with money, and earnest country vicars. Mackenzie also shows an alarming tendency to kill off his characters once they've served their purpose in plot development. There are a number of funny lines (which probably could have appeared in any book treating these stock characters at this time) and a sense that the struggles of the protagonist are taken seriously, though they never seem too deep.

"The Altar Steps" is the first book of a trilogy, the latter books of which do not seem to be in print.

[Pat Glaze · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this to be a very strange book. My family and I had been watch "Monarch of the Glen" on NetFlix. We found the first two seasons amusing. The series is based on the works of Compton Mackenzie, so I grabbed this from the library. However, this novel was not related to that series. It is an exploration of the "Catholic movement" in the Anglican church and the progress of a young man who was raised in a "Romanized" version of the Church of England as he becomes a vicar. Who knew there was such a movement and counter movement? All very obscure and not overly interesting to me, though I guess I followed the story and nuances of the doctrinal disputes with a bit of a curiosity.