The subject is closed ... Photograph: David Levene
What's the best way to celebrate Graham Greene's 103rd birthday (sinfully late)? I always like to do so with a spiritual crisis and a bottle of whisky in an uncomfortably hot climate. Going to mass half-cut in a state of mortal sin - you can't beat it for intensity of fear and remorse.
Actually, I will be doing no such thing - whatever the state, real or imagined, of my immortal soul. And neither will any contemporary novelist that I can think of. For religion seems to have disappeared from modern English fiction. Now, this being the blogosphere, where thousands upon thousands of you not only have opinions but sometimes even useful information to impart, I expect a few examples which disprove the above statement, but largely, I think I'm right.
Let's go back to the locus classicus of the spiritual crisis - Greene's The Heart of the Matter. If you have not read it, go and find a summary of the plot on the net. It is a very affecting novel - and yet it has a big problem, as George Orwell put it when he reviewed it. And it is with Orwell's review, I think, that the air started leaking out of the religious novel: "I have not parodied the plot of the book. Even when dressed up in realistic details, it is just as ridiculous as I have indicated. The thing most obviously wrong with it is that Scobie's motives, assuming one could believe in them, do not adequately explain his actions."
He adds: "It is impossible not to feel a sort of snobbishness in Mr. Greene's attitude, both here and in his other books written from an explicitly Catholic standpoint. He appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué in being damned."
At around the same time Evelyn Waugh was making his Catholicism, and the agonies it could cause him, explicit in Brideshead Revisited and, later, the Sword of Honour trilogy. I cannot remember the precise details of the Catholic agonising in Brideshead; if you can, unprompted, then it is, I suspect, because you are intimately familiar with the doctrinal points involved.
And what do we have since then? Iris Murdoch could write about the religious impulse in quite a fascinating way - see The Green Knight (1993), although that is as much a warning about the desire to be holy as a vindication of it. Alice Thomas Ellis had a nice line in the things-that-go-bump-in-the-night side of belief; John Irving has a streak of religiosity half a mile wide; Updike can address the constituency of brainy Episcopalians; and ... well, that's it.
What's funny is how the most nakedly religious works of the 20th century are both for children: The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. My mention of the former will not surprise anyone; the latter might, particularly as there is not a single mention of any kind of religious observance in it. But that is a dog not barking in the night. Tolkien said that every word of it was inspired by, and measured against, his Catholic faith. Read in that light, it becomes quite interesting.
But serious, grown-up religious despair or difficulty - where's that gone? And should we mind?
