Michael Arditti's top 10 novels about priests

From Friar Tuck to Father Ted, clergy occupy a special place in popular culture. Even the most anticlerical reader is likely to have a favourite fictional priest, if only in childhood memories of Roald Dahl's Vicar of Nibbleswicke.

Although in recent years polemics against religion have eclipsed novels about religious life in both bestseller lists and media discourse, there remains a huge range of literary work featuring clergy, from Sloth, the drunken priest in William Langland's Piers Plowman, and the Monk, Friar, Pardoner and Parson in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, to Father Ralph de Bricassart in Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds and Father Lankester Merrin in William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist.

I myself have written about a variety of clerical figures, from a spiritually and sexually confused ordinand in The Celibate, a liberal vicar and his Christ-like curate in Easter, through an apostate bishop in The Enemy of the Good, to my current protagonist, an English missionary priest who fights oppression in Marcos's Philippines in The Breath of Night.

In accordance with the diversity of beliefs featured in my own work, I have been deliberately ecumenical in this choice, while ranging widely in both style and setting in order to show the richness of religious-themed fiction.

1. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Like all of Dostoevsky's work, The Brothers Karamazov is steeped in theological conflict and debate, nowhere more so than in Book Five of this novel where, in an attempt to explain his repudiation of God to his younger brother, Alyosha, Ivan Karamazov tells the story of the Grand Inquisitor, the supreme exponent of ecclesiastical sophistry, who rejects the Christ he is supposed to serve, claiming that His return to earth threatens the mission of the church.

2. The Warden by Anthony Trollope

Clerics play as significant a role in the great English comic novels of the 18th and 19th centuries as they did in life. This process reaches its apogee in Anthony Trollope's Barchester Chronicles. Although it lacks the immortal Mrs Proudie, my own favourite of the sequence is The Warden, not least for its portrait of the titular figure, Septimus Harding, the archetypal bumbling clergyman, whose intentions – as those of so many before and since – are misunderstood by the press.

3. Noli Me Tangere by José Rizal

Given the Philippine setting of The Breath of Night, I have a particular interest in this late 19th-century novel, which was hugely influential on the development of Philippine nationalism and the country's struggle for independence from Spain. Fray Dámaso Vardolagas, the villainous curate who persecutes the hero and his family, epitomises the venal Spanish friars who had governed the Philippines for 300 years. Among Filipinos, his name remains a byword for clerical corruption.

4. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson writes with almost biblical authority about John Ames, an elderly Congregationalist pastor for whom the Bible is the bedrock of life. As Ames records his memoirs for the seven-year-old son whom he knows he will never see reach adulthood, he struggles to come to terms both emotionally and intellectually with the legacy of his father and grandfather. Meanwhile, he is unsettled by the return of his dissolute godson, Jack Boughton (the hero of Robinson's subsequent novel, Home), who tests his notions of Christian forgiveness to the full.

5. The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos

It is easy to see why this deceptively simple story of an idealistic young priest struggling with his own spiritual conflicts and failing health while ministering to a deeply compromised flock in a 1930s French village appealed to director Robert Bresson, who adapted it into a highly acclaimed film. Despite little in the way of plot or even character development, the novel's luminous portrayal of its protagonist, a man of singular integrity and decency, has rarely been matched.

6. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Jean Latour (the "archbishop" of the title) and his friend, Joseph Vaillant, travel to the newly-established diocese of Santa Fe in 1848 shortly after Mexico ceded the territory to the US. Cather movingly chronicles the two men's attempts over the next 40 years to promulgate their faith in a singularly unwelcoming setting. With its painterly prose, this is one of the finest accounts of active Church mission.

7. English Passengers by Matthew Kneale

Matthew Kneale's award-winning novel is told in a variety of voices, but at its heart is that of the Reverend Geoffrey Wilson, who charters the former smuggling vessel, the Sincerity, to sail to Australia in a bid to prove that the Garden of Eden was located in Tasmania. Kneale skilfully turns the conflict between Wilson and his travelling companion, the ethnologist Dr Thomas Potter, into the embodiment of the 19th-century battle between religion and science.

8. Silence by Shusaku Endo

Endo, a Japanese Catholic, who suffered religious prejudice in his own country, used his outsider's perspective to great effect in this study of a 17th-century Portuguese missionary sent to Japan to investigate his former teacher's apostasy. A powerful – and semi-factual – story is here combined with a profound meditation on the nature of human sufferssing.

9. Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe

After dithering between Firbank's Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli and this one for a place as joker in the pack, I've opted for the latter because, although Rolfe's leaden prose is no match for Firbank's burnished dialogue, his plot in which a failed candidate for the priesthood (a thinly veiled portrait of the author) is transported to Rome and elected pope remains the ultimate wish-fulfilment in clerical fiction.

10. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

The phrase "whisky priest" is routinely attached to several of Graham Greene's characters, but he himself coined it to describe the unnamed protagonist of The Power and the Glory. In contrast to some of his later works where he uses exotic settings as little more than backdrops for western love triangles, Greene here enters fully into the struggle between church and state in 1930s Mexico and his hero's spiritual journey is deeply affecting.

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