THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD

Michael Arditti (Arcadia, £11.99)

Michael Arditti brings religion to the heart of his novels; the lives of his characters — and the discourse between them — cover a wide range of matters theological and teleological. The book’s title comes from Voltaire’s line: “The best is the enemy of the good”, with its intimations of the inhibiting aspects of perfection.

And perfection in one person’s eyes is, of course, not necessarily perfection from another’s point of view. There are conflicts of this sort throughout the novel, between the members of the Granville family, and between their beliefs and lifestyles, their upbringing and their chosen path. It’s a bizarre, atypical family. Edwin is a retired bishop, who lost his faith in the midst of his career, and even published a book about it. His wife Marta, a controversial anthropologist, was in the Warsaw ghetto, and has much ‘baggage’ of her own.

Their two living children are not conventional by any means: Clement is quite a famous gay painter, but traumatised by the death of his twin brother in early adulthood; Susannah is a music publicist recovering from an affair with a convicted murderer.

You can see that the story is not going to be simple from the outset.

The novel begins with Clement painting a figure of Christ, using as his model an Algerian refugee, a Muslim. Soon he is wrestling with an invitation from his brother Mark’s widow to father a child with her. The problem is that he is HIV positive – in fact, he met his current boyfriend on an HIV retreat.

Meanwhile, Susannah begins to explore the Kabbalah, enters the world of Chassidic Jews, and plunges headlong into a relationship with one of them.

But she cannot integrate her old life and her new; and her parents are terrified of losing her.

It’s a particular challenge for Marta, who has rejected her own Jewish faith, and Edwin’s illness poses yet more challenges. In The Enemy of the Good,

Arditti has written a vivid book about religious conventions and personal faith, peopled with characters of intense conviction. It’s set in the Britain of today, with the overlap between religion and politics becoming increasingly blurred. The conflict between liberalism and fundamentalism is no less real than it ever was, despite our ‘understanding’ of each other. Arditti’s novel takes a sympathetic view of that conflict, and of the private, personal yet political elements of all those who hold their religion dear.