Reverend John Ames married a second time late in life, and pens this long letter to his young son knowing he will not live to see him reach adulthood. The year is 1956, but the story winds in and out among tales of his father and grandfathers, advice to his son, and a diary of events as they unfold.

The viewpoint is unwaveringly that of the reverend. But it is more than a viewpoint – it is the coherent Christian perspective, one that was the base of European civilisation for a thousand years. No shadow of irony is cast, no hint of absurdity, no sentimentality. Ames seems to have borrowed much from St. Augustine’s Confessions, intertwining personal worries with biblical verses, following reason up to a point and then yielding to the mystery of faith.

I walked up to the church in the dark, as I said. There was a very bright moon. It’s strange how you never quite get used to the world at night. I have seen moonlight strong enough to cast shadows any number of times. And the wind is the same wind, rustling the same leaves, night or day. When I was a young boy I used to get up before every dawn of the world to fetch water and firewood. It was a very different life then. I remember walking out into the dark and feeling as if the dark were a great, cool sea and the houses and the sheds and the woods were all adrift in it, just about to ease off their moorings. I always felt like an intruder then, and I still do, as if the darkness had a claim on everything, one that I violated just by stepping out my door.

The above section gives a good impression of the whole book. In a couple of places he broods at a more theological level, bringing in Feuerbach and sundry authors he has read.

The madness of the modern is far distant in this story. It is a shock that the mythological conception of the universe is so close and yet so extinct. The calm piety of the narrator is placed in the last decade in which it was possible – any later and such belief begins to reek of reactionary fundamentalism, a willful turning away from science and modern thought.

The medium is the message. This book could have been an elderly parishioner’s accolade to his lineage of pastors. It could be the editied diaries of a preacher. But no, it is a piece of literary fiction, a novel for the international market. Winner of the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award, blurbs of praise from all the large newspapers. The author seems to have drawn a lot of Jesus-nostalgia out into the open. Even so, I’m baffled.