Preface (Andrew O'hagan's Novel, Be Near Me ) (Critical Essay‪)‬

BIRDS AND BIRD SONGS inhabit the edges of the troubled contemporary world evoked vividly by Andrew O'Hagan's recent novel, Be Near Me (2006). (1) The Scottish island Ailsa Craig, referred to in the novel as a bird sanctuary and as a "golden spot on the Irish Sea" (93), is the setting in the novel in which the narrator presents an avid account of his Catholic faith. The island provides a haven of beauty in a novel set primarily in harsh urban conditions. Late in the novel the narrator, a Scottish Catholic priest, attends a concert performance of Olivier Messiaen's brilliant composition Oiseaux exotiques, and describes the work as "a wild aviary of earthly things struggling to wing the imaginary sky," and observes that "birds were the first musicians" (245). In a contrasting image, the odor of a dead bird thrown into the back seat of a car as a disgusting practical joke suggests the stench of cultural decay that haunts the world of the novel. O'Hagan exhibits a world suffering from cultural deformation and therefore incapable of resonating fully with the beauty offered by nature and art; but nevertheless it is a world in which divine love hovers as an offer and a promise in the atmosphere. Be Near Me is a daring novel in the subject matter it addresses. The narrator is a Roman Catholic priest named David Anderton, born in Scotland with a Benedictine education at Ampleforth in Yorkshire before studying at Oxford and Rome, who at the age of fifty-six is assigned to a parish on the coast of Scotland not far from Glasgow. Fr. Anderton (through what he acknowledges as weakness of judgment) becomes friends with a group of young people and, in an extreme climate that draws together a number of sources of resentment against the priest, is accused of sexually abusing a teenage boy. Without denying the troubling reality of abuse as a contemporary issue, O'Hagan nonetheless chooses to examine thoughtfully in this fictional situation the sources of hatred toward the priest that are evident throughout Fr. Anderton's parish and the human flaws in his complex inner life that provided material for this hatred to seize upon. Love seems everywhere distorted, attenuated, and uprooted in this world, and the focus of the novel is upon a deformed cultural world that seems in many ways to be inhospitable to faith but in which the deepest human longings are nevertheless for love and faith--a world in which people are quietly 'looking for faith in the cold night air," (305) quoting from the final page of the novel.