Here are 90 furious little spats about our extraordinary and inadequate attitudes to God. Alice Thomas Ellis has subtitled them her ‘assembled thoughts’ on her Roman Catholic faith and what she sees as its suicidal attempts at liberalisation. She is impassioned, funny, fearless and has been in hot water a number of times with the Church and the periodicals she writes for. The Universe sacked her.
There is an affectionate introduction by Richard Ingrams, who says that he loves misfits and drop-outs and likes to provide them with soapboxes (e.g. in The Oldie, he describes her as a woman who has suffered in her time but keeps at the heart of the fight). She is no recluse. She is a great cook, a cigarette-smoker, publisher, friend and aide of writers, novelist, mother of seven and a good grandmother, but has ‘that look in the eyes’ that Stevie Smith once observed in holy people of wishing to be elsewhere. Her elsewhere is clearly the old hell-fire religion of the unreformed Church. She is too sharp a writer to let the nostalgia show, but there it is.
She would be the last to call herself a ‘holy person’. She despises her confessor because he does not understand how wicked she is and gives meagre penances, suggesting that she should go home and rest, as he may possibly need to do himself, after dealing with her confessions, good as she undoubtedly is. She often wants to go to the back of the queue and go round again in order to say, ‘And another thing.’ Which seems a rather liberal way of behaving towards the Cloth through whom God has just granted Absolution.
Some of her beliefs do seem to be blazingly right. She has met some terrible priests and bishops.
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