Shorts

‘What I wanted to do was to write a story that would confront me with a number of incidents requiring moral, philosophical or theological reflection,’ Terry Lane writes in the postscript to this novel. There’s something a little unfashionable about such an aim: most contemporary fiction markets itself in more secular terms. But Lane was once a religious minister, prior to his career in broadcasting, and this book testifies to that history. It is a novel that returns obsessively to questions of spiritual crisis and dissent. From the perspective of the dissenter, it targets public morality, and doctrinaire religious observance. From that of a sceptic, it asks how senseless disasters can be squared with a divine plan.