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Aelred's Sin
Robert de la Borde comes from the Caribbean to England in the 1980's after hearing that his brother, Jean Marc, has died. In Bristol, his brother's journals prompt Robert to visit the Ashton Park Monastery, which Jean Marc entered in the 1960's as Brother Aelred. There Robert pieces together Jean Marc's life; his exuberance, his mental suffering, and his struggle to balance his sexual impulses with his love of God. As Robert is forced to question his inherited prejudices, what unfolds is a story about the triumph of compassion over brutality. Moving from present to past, from cruelty to sympathy, Aelred's Sin is a powerful new novel of erotic love, spiritual awakening and above all, reconciliation.
- GenresLGBT
304 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2000
1 person is currently reading
45 people want to read
About the author
Lawrence Scott
57 books10 followersLawrence Scott is a prize-winning Caribbean novelist and short-story writer from Trinidad & Tobago.
He has been awarded and short-listed for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book and Best First Book in Canada & the Caribbean, twice Long-Listed for The International Impac Dublin Literary Award, The Whitbread Prize and The Booker Prize. He was awarded the Tom-Gallon Short-Story Award.
His work has stimulated critical work into the post-colonial novel’s use of magic-realism, carnival, calypso, her/history, storytelling, dialect/standard narratives, identity, landscape, the body, race, religion and homo/sexuality.
His work has been performed on the BBC. His poetry has been anthologised in Europe and the Caribbean. He travels frequently in North and South America and the Caribbean and has read, lectured and talked about his work internationally.
Books
Biography
Critical Essays
Bibliography
TV & Radio
He was Writer-in-Residence at the University of the West Indies and was a judge for the 2006 Commonwealth Short-Story Competition.
He is A Senior Research Fellow of The Academy at Unversity of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT) for Arts, Letters, Culture and Public Affairs 2006-2009.
He lives and works in both Trinidad and England, writing and teaching literature as well as creative writing at The City Literary Institute in London, The Arvon Foundation and City & Islington Sixth Form College where he taught for many years.
He has been awarded and short-listed for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book and Best First Book in Canada & the Caribbean, twice Long-Listed for The International Impac Dublin Literary Award, The Whitbread Prize and The Booker Prize. He was awarded the Tom-Gallon Short-Story Award.
His work has stimulated critical work into the post-colonial novel’s use of magic-realism, carnival, calypso, her/history, storytelling, dialect/standard narratives, identity, landscape, the body, race, religion and homo/sexuality.
His work has been performed on the BBC. His poetry has been anthologised in Europe and the Caribbean. He travels frequently in North and South America and the Caribbean and has read, lectured and talked about his work internationally.
Books
Biography
Critical Essays
Bibliography
TV & Radio
He was Writer-in-Residence at the University of the West Indies and was a judge for the 2006 Commonwealth Short-Story Competition.
He is A Senior Research Fellow of The Academy at Unversity of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT) for Arts, Letters, Culture and Public Affairs 2006-2009.
He lives and works in both Trinidad and England, writing and teaching literature as well as creative writing at The City Literary Institute in London, The Arvon Foundation and City & Islington Sixth Form College where he taught for many years.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 16, 2016
An interesting read and compelling in many ways, though always keeping you at a distance as a reader, mostly due to the transcript style of narrative. It was a little difficult to get into at first as the language is rich with imagery, literally more flowery than I usually like, and making sense of the shifting timelines. It is infinitely sad but hopeful at the same time and in places I was grateful for the distance the narrative created. Seeing both sides of the struggle the protagonists experienced, how to reconcile their experiences and world views, creates a bond between them and myself as the reader. It's not a comfortable read. It deals with religion, homosexuality, racism, slavery, and how we reconcile our history, society and ourselves. It's difficult to look honestly at these things and be open about doubt and fear and the choices you make because of them. This book encompasses these things and I think it's only once you close it for the last time, you realise just how much you have absorbed from it.
That said, I think there are too many strands to the narrative and I think some of the ideas are not fully articulated, or maybe I missed them trying to keep everything straight. The lack of speech marks in the Robert sections was distracting and the shifts of story did take me by surprise on occasion. These are mostly niggling things but I found them distracting when trying to immerse myself in the story.
Overall, good but not a re-read for me.
That said, I think there are too many strands to the narrative and I think some of the ideas are not fully articulated, or maybe I missed them trying to keep everything straight. The lack of speech marks in the Robert sections was distracting and the shifts of story did take me by surprise on occasion. These are mostly niggling things but I found them distracting when trying to immerse myself in the story.
Overall, good but not a re-read for me.
July 27, 2021
It took me some time to read Aelred's Sin, and yet when it became time, I reached for it like any faithful companion, found it waiting with chasuble and scapular. I don't think I will read a more sensitive, aching book this year. I don't think it's easy, or neat, to write about spiritual ecstasy, but it is and has long been one of my favourite things to *read* about. Many times during my stay with this book, I thought about perhaps the first definite novel to make me feel this way, La Porte étroite.
Lawrence Scott has written, clear and resonant like the sound a bell makes in the stillness of the night, about men who love each other and who love God, and if this sounds like a simple thing, perhaps it might seem so, because of the care, the meticulous detail of monastic life, and the gothic compulsion to honour a dangerous island home, that Scott breathes into every page. Aelred will never let me go, I believe. I will be back here, to pray and think and pray some more.
Lawrence Scott has written, clear and resonant like the sound a bell makes in the stillness of the night, about men who love each other and who love God, and if this sounds like a simple thing, perhaps it might seem so, because of the care, the meticulous detail of monastic life, and the gothic compulsion to honour a dangerous island home, that Scott breathes into every page. Aelred will never let me go, I believe. I will be back here, to pray and think and pray some more.
July 22, 2024
This is a difficult novel to rate. On the one hand Lawrence Scott is a very good writer and I will be reading more of his work but Aelred's Sin is problematic because although beautifully written, particularly in the handling of religious belief, I believe that there is an element of special pleading, near to proselytising propaganda, that mares the novel.
The novel is the investigation by a younger brother, Robert de la Borde, into his older brother, Jean Marc's, who has recently died. Jean Marc left his home in Trinidad immediately after finishing school and entered a monastery in the UK but left before taking vows. I don't think I am giving any more away then the Goodreads synopsis does when I say this is a novel about Jean Marc's struggle (he takes the name Aelred when enters the monastery) to reconcile his sexuality and faith. Robert as he learns more about Aelred's life confronts his prejudices as he learns more about his brother's spiritual struggles and of the horrible homophobic violence that led him to flee Trinidad and seek a new life in a religious order. All this is handled with great finesse and narrative vevre. The various plotlines in the present and past, character when as Jean Marc at school and then as Aelred in the monastery are deftly handled. It is a very readable novel.
But, the inevitable but, there is reason Lawrence Scott has chosen to set his novel in past, the early 1960s, to examine the struggle of a young man with his sexuality and his attempts to reconcile it with the faith has grown up in. This was an era that predates not 'gay' liberation but the changes that Vatican II brought to Catholic Church or any of the other social changes that the later 1960s brought to all aspects of the way people lived and thought. It was a world that, looking back, can appear simpler, with right and wrong clearly defined. If you want a visual image go find pictures of Popes Pius XII and John XXIII in the sedia gestatoria, bedecked with bejewelled triple tiara and vestments, ostrich plume fans which were last scene in the court of the Byzantine emperors flanking them, and surrounded by the brilliantly uniformed 'noble guard' and the rest of the papal court. This was authority as an omnipotent being who told you what to do and think. In most secular countries politicians may have abandoned the Vatican's glittering garb for mufti but they demanded the same uncritical respect.
The problem is that using this past in a 21st century novel is a copout. The pope may have abandoned the sedia gestatoria, ostrich plumes, triple tiara and papal court but is still telling people how to live their lives. Secular politicians are still around seeking ways to curtail the hard won changes of the 1960s (sadly probably more now than when Aelred's Sin was published in 2000). Now there are too many shades of grey, too many subtleties to write a simplistic novel like Aelred's Sin. But if you are going to examine sexuality, religious belief and prejudice in any worthwhile way you need to do it from reality not a fictitious past because, although it seems issues were clearer before the changes of the late 1960s things were never as simple as it is presented in novels like this. If Mr. Scott really had something he wanted to say about being gay and religious faith, and I think he does, he should have set his novel in the 1990s.
What Mr. Scott wants to say about being gay and reconciling it with religious, specifically catholic, tradition and belief, is what undermines the novel. I can't help feeling that the section set in the monastery and Aelred's discovery of the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux to reconcile being gay with being catholic. But once a novel moves into the realm of apologetics it becomes propaganda. Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, great authors who became Catholics and whose writings were suffused with their Catholic beliefs never attempted to reconcile the religious dogma with the contradictions and complexities of real life. Scobie, in Greene's Heart of the Matter, doesn't attempt to find ways round the Catholic Church's teaching to excuse his infidelity. Nor does Charles Ryder in Waugh's Brideshead Revisited try and seek out theological loopholes so that he and Lady Julia Flyte can be together. Mr. Scott has Aelred attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable, which is why we never really learn much about his life from the time he leaves the monastery.
What Aelred fails to see, or Mr. Scott doesn't see, is that the problem isn't the Catholic Church's teachings on 'homosexuality' but its teachings on sex. It was, and still is despite some fancy legerdemain over the years, to reduce life to a series of does and don'ts and to channel human physical and emotional natures into a straight jacket of right and wrong. It was destructive of all sexual or emotional relations, hetero or homo. Its template for perfection was an unrealistic but obsessive concentration on 'purity' and 'virginity'. I don't see why Aelred should try and reconcile his sexuality with Catholicism. I believe Catholicism needs to reconcile itself with human nature. It wouldn't take much for me to find it easy to dislike this novel.
But Lawrence Scott is too good a writer and my dislikes probably come perilously close to complaining that he didn't write the novel I would have liked him to have written. That is why, for all its faults, I give the novel three stars and though I don't recommend the novel I do recommend Mr. Scott as an author worth reading.
The novel is the investigation by a younger brother, Robert de la Borde, into his older brother, Jean Marc's, who has recently died. Jean Marc left his home in Trinidad immediately after finishing school and entered a monastery in the UK but left before taking vows. I don't think I am giving any more away then the Goodreads synopsis does when I say this is a novel about Jean Marc's struggle (he takes the name Aelred when enters the monastery) to reconcile his sexuality and faith. Robert as he learns more about Aelred's life confronts his prejudices as he learns more about his brother's spiritual struggles and of the horrible homophobic violence that led him to flee Trinidad and seek a new life in a religious order. All this is handled with great finesse and narrative vevre. The various plotlines in the present and past, character when as Jean Marc at school and then as Aelred in the monastery are deftly handled. It is a very readable novel.
But, the inevitable but, there is reason Lawrence Scott has chosen to set his novel in past, the early 1960s, to examine the struggle of a young man with his sexuality and his attempts to reconcile it with the faith has grown up in. This was an era that predates not 'gay' liberation but the changes that Vatican II brought to Catholic Church or any of the other social changes that the later 1960s brought to all aspects of the way people lived and thought. It was a world that, looking back, can appear simpler, with right and wrong clearly defined. If you want a visual image go find pictures of Popes Pius XII and John XXIII in the sedia gestatoria, bedecked with bejewelled triple tiara and vestments, ostrich plume fans which were last scene in the court of the Byzantine emperors flanking them, and surrounded by the brilliantly uniformed 'noble guard' and the rest of the papal court. This was authority as an omnipotent being who told you what to do and think. In most secular countries politicians may have abandoned the Vatican's glittering garb for mufti but they demanded the same uncritical respect.
The problem is that using this past in a 21st century novel is a copout. The pope may have abandoned the sedia gestatoria, ostrich plumes, triple tiara and papal court but is still telling people how to live their lives. Secular politicians are still around seeking ways to curtail the hard won changes of the 1960s (sadly probably more now than when Aelred's Sin was published in 2000). Now there are too many shades of grey, too many subtleties to write a simplistic novel like Aelred's Sin. But if you are going to examine sexuality, religious belief and prejudice in any worthwhile way you need to do it from reality not a fictitious past because, although it seems issues were clearer before the changes of the late 1960s things were never as simple as it is presented in novels like this. If Mr. Scott really had something he wanted to say about being gay and religious faith, and I think he does, he should have set his novel in the 1990s.
What Mr. Scott wants to say about being gay and reconciling it with religious, specifically catholic, tradition and belief, is what undermines the novel. I can't help feeling that the section set in the monastery and Aelred's discovery of the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux to reconcile being gay with being catholic. But once a novel moves into the realm of apologetics it becomes propaganda. Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, great authors who became Catholics and whose writings were suffused with their Catholic beliefs never attempted to reconcile the religious dogma with the contradictions and complexities of real life. Scobie, in Greene's Heart of the Matter, doesn't attempt to find ways round the Catholic Church's teaching to excuse his infidelity. Nor does Charles Ryder in Waugh's Brideshead Revisited try and seek out theological loopholes so that he and Lady Julia Flyte can be together. Mr. Scott has Aelred attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable, which is why we never really learn much about his life from the time he leaves the monastery.
What Aelred fails to see, or Mr. Scott doesn't see, is that the problem isn't the Catholic Church's teachings on 'homosexuality' but its teachings on sex. It was, and still is despite some fancy legerdemain over the years, to reduce life to a series of does and don'ts and to channel human physical and emotional natures into a straight jacket of right and wrong. It was destructive of all sexual or emotional relations, hetero or homo. Its template for perfection was an unrealistic but obsessive concentration on 'purity' and 'virginity'. I don't see why Aelred should try and reconcile his sexuality with Catholicism. I believe Catholicism needs to reconcile itself with human nature. It wouldn't take much for me to find it easy to dislike this novel.
But Lawrence Scott is too good a writer and my dislikes probably come perilously close to complaining that he didn't write the novel I would have liked him to have written. That is why, for all its faults, I give the novel three stars and though I don't recommend the novel I do recommend Mr. Scott as an author worth reading.
March 6, 2008
excellent book, he was my english teacher at college
August 24, 2018
Have read this 3 times and ready to read it again. A beautiful story
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews