Glittering Images Book

This is not high literature. Howatch's Church of England series is really like romance novels for Anglicans. It's not that they lack sex-- there's plenty, mostly angsty, as you'd expect for a set of Anglo-Catholic classics. Rather, the narrative place of sex in a romance novel is taken by spiritual direction. You don't have fantasy lovers; you have psychic monks who can tell you exactly what's wrong with your relationship with God and your family, and what you need to do to fix it. Anyone who's had a real spiritual director-- or, worse, aspired to be one-- will find this fantasy irresistible, as I did.

Of the four I've completed, I still like this one best. Partly it's because its narrator is my favorite (he's a scholar-priest for heaven's sake). Partly, too, it's because the temporal setting of the later books is more familiar, so I can more easily see how Howatch is building her world out of tropes. (The swinging-Sixties fourth volume, "Scandalous Risks", is especially awful in this regard.)