Product Description

When an English priest takes over a small Scottish parish, not everyone is ready to accept him. He makes friends with two local youths, Mark and Lisa, and clashes with a world he can barely understand. The town seems to grow darker each night. Fate comes calling and before the summer is out his quiet life is the focus of public hysteria. Meanwhile a religious war is unfolding on his doorstep..."Be Near Me" is a brilliantly moving story of art and politics, love and change and the way we live now.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20291 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-05
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
"'One of the few truly essential works of fiction to emerge from this country during the past 20 years or more.' John Burnside, Daily Telegraph"

The Times
'O'Hagan is devastatingly amusing ... Be Near Me establishes O'Hagan as one of our most sympathetic prose-poets.'

Literary Review
'A work that portrays tragedy with such intelligence, tenerness and honesty.'

Customer Reviews

Damp squib
Father David, an Englishman and a Catholic priest, in a small mainly protestant Scottish town, gets more than he bargained for when he befriends two local teens in a bid to relive his youth.

I'm wondering whether this Booker Prize nominee got this book published just on the strength of his nomination. Yes it's beautifully written in places, but the basics:
* Gripping storyline
* Believable characters
* Engaging sub plot
* Exciting dialogue
Just aren't there!!

The main character feels unrealistic and hollow for a man of the cloth. Great chunks of his work life are skipped or just glossed over so you don't get a sense of how his inner turmoil impacts on his work or how he relates to people in the village - key factors I'd have thought to successfully depict a priest. As a result we are left with far too much introspection with very little about what's going on outside to balance it. There are few who can pull off an engaging and rounded story written in the first person, unfortunately O'Hagan failed miserably in this case.

A book about loneliness, love, morality, faith and despair
David Anderson, an English priest, is sent to take over a small parish on the west coast of Scotland. But it is a very uncomfortable and uneasy setting for him and he finds his own culture and education (and pretensions) at odds with the society to which he is supposed to be ministering. He befriends a pair of teenagers from the local Catholic School and is sucked into their world, in turn fascinated and repelled by their behaviour and attitude. You soon realise that it will all end badly.......

David narrates the story but we are unsure whether he is naïve, flawed, arrogant or just plain stupid. The writing is beautiful and the author evokes strong images of both the idyllic past of David's education at Oxford and the hellishness of the small town he now finds himself in. There are some brilliant "set pieces" - such as the meal of fish and wine he prepares, his conversations with Mrs Poole and the scene in court. Towards the end it was a bit like watching a train crash - you know something awful was going to happen but you can't look away! Be Near Me is about loneliness, love, morality, faith and despair and deserved its place on the prize lists.

My one problem with the book is the difference in ages between David and the teenagers - would a man in his sixth decade really hang out with two fifteen year olds? Perhaps a smaller age gap would have been better.

I'm not sure that I've done justice to this very fine book - which certainly deserves a second reading.

willing suspension of disbelief is impossible
in this novel. However emotionally starved and crippled the priest may be, his fascination with fairly disgusting young people is not credible.