Unseen Things Above

UNSEEN Things Above by Catherine Fox (Marylebone House, £9.99) is the sequel to "Acts and Omissions"
published last year. At the end of the previous volume we left the good folk of the cathedral close at Lindchester to their preparations for Christmas. We now rejoin the plot and find ourselves skipped forward to April and the diocese continues to be in crisis and the cathedral continues to be in a state of agitation.

Troublesome
Who shall be the new bishop? Will the troubled and troublesome Freddy May ever settle down and must the cathedral really give him a job? Will the archdeacon marry his lovely Jane? Will Ed get to marry his lovely Neil? Will Bishop Harry have a nervous breakdown before he has a heart attack? Will the bishop's chaplain ever get over himself? Will the Church of England get over its alleged institutional homophobia? Will the Church of England ever consecrate a woman bishop? Oh my goodness, so much trauma and tribulation, it could only be the Church! This is a book in which, while well-written as ever, the dialogue does get somewhat drowned out by the noise of grinding axes. Do not misunderstand me, the issues addressed are important issues of justice and it is right that they are addressed. However, where in the previous volume the issues ran alongside the story, in this book the issues have become the story.

Required
Fox tells of the church in which couples living in a same-sex civil partnership are required to remain celibate and uses the opportunity for the archdeacon to enter into a civil partnership with his opposite-sex partner
in New Zealand to highlight a point of hypocrisy. She pushes further in reminding the reader that it is now legal for same-sex couples to be married and yet Fr Ed is forbidden by the Church from marrying his same sex partner. In both of these instances, the partners of the clergy who find themselves in such a bind are lay people and neither are all that enamoured by the Church. Some interesting dialogue ensues as Jane and Neil harangue their partners about their experience of a church which encroaches into parts of life which angels
may fear to tread! This is a good book and well worth reading. It would be easy for us Methodists to gloat at the predicament of the Church of England and say that such things would not happen in our Church, but we would be wrong to do so.

Topic
The issues are live issues and are going to be the topic of consideration across the Connexion over coming months. Yes, it's a novel, but it is one which helps put flesh on the bones of discussion and conflict that is already out there.