One kiss too many

Something is eating away at Father David Anderton, the narrator of Be Near Me, a novel as beautiful and perfectly pitched as its title. An English priest working in the Scottish parish of Dalgarnock, he is afflicted by ‘a large private sense of wanting to depart from the person I had always been’. Not his faith but his willingness to evangelise has vanished, and all that remains is his propensity to favour the workings of private taste over public rallying cries. He hates bigotry and small-mindedness and believes in improving the mind; he despises the atmosphere at the local school where ‘education is a matter of bitter entrenchment as opposed to any sort of managed revelation’.

Along comes Mark McNulty, a local teenage delinquent who possesses ‘the kind of sharp and brutal honesty that passes for charm in some people’. Mark spells trouble. He cares little for anything. But he is beautiful to look at and he knows ‘how to insinuate himself into people’s worries about themselves’.