Late one night, Clarissa Phipps, the new rector of St Peter’s church in the village of Tapley, stumbles upon something she shouldn’t have seen. She finds one of her parishioners, Brian Salmon, in a state of undress with a 15-year-old local boy, David Leaves. She knows them and their families well; she knows the damage the revelations will cause. Still she must report them. “Never had doing the right thing felt so wrong.”
Michael Arditti’s latest novel explores the timeless difficulty of doing the right thing. It also, in a clever, questioning narrative that covers love, art, sex and spirituality, explores why doing the wrong thing often feels so right. And, as in much of Arditti’s fiction – in novels such as The Anointed and The Enemy of the Good – Christianity is the guiding force.
The story is set primarily in 2019, except for one part that takes us back to 1987. Clarissa and her husband, Marcus, a curator at the Tate, have an arrangement: since his affair, he spends part of his time in London with his mistress, and part of his time in Tapley with Clarissa and their son, Xan. Their relationship remains loving, supportive and amicable, if wanting. They are kept together by love for their son and a shared interest in, and history with, the local artist Seward Wemlock.
Wemlock is the rotten core of the novel. He is “a deeply religious man” and a great artist: comparable to “Sutherland, Piper, Eric Gill and, of course, Stanley Spencer”. As with these last two artists, there are distasteful rumours about his private life, which his sexualised paintings do nothing to dispel. In 1987, he is commissioned to produce a set of panels for St Peter’s church. Clarissa and Marcus are overjoyed, for both personal and professional reasons. The paintings are hailed as masterpieces by most, but spread disquiet for the use of two 15-year-old models for Adam and Eve: “Their pose was imbued with a sensuousness that made even sophisticated viewers uneasy.”
Back in 2019, the fallout from her decision to report what she saw has caused Clarissa to reconsider the value of Wemlock’s artwork, and to wonder at her own complicity, in this and other matters. Knowing what she does, should the paintings stay up? Arditti nicely dramatises the difficulty in separating the art from the artist. Wemlock is charming and convincing, his aesthetic and moral philosophy carrying Clarissa and Marcus along as they hear only what they want to hear. Clarissa, a progressive who has fought hard for the right of female ordination, still has her blind spots: “It was inconceivable that Seward, blessed not only with a God-given talent but a devout faith, would have been capable of such depravity.”
There are a number of gently handled scenes: Clarissa tending to her dying brother; discussing with her mother their abusive but beloved father. The tone does occasionally falter. The young folk are somewhat poorly rendered, with 14-year-old Xan limited to grunts of “Sup”, “Dur!”, or “Zzz!” And, as in his other works, Arditti is prone to an unhelpful facetiousness (when underage David is discovered with Brian he says: “I’m practically an adult. So my mum says”), which often undermines the seriousness of the scene at hand.
These quibbles aside, The Choice is an intelligent and entertaining novel that handles lightly problems of great moral weight. Clarissa faces many hard choices and unearths many horrors, but in the end, for her and for the reader, it is all worth it.
• The Choice is published by Arcadia (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
