Absolute Truths.

The world of Susan Howatch's Starbridge series--six novels about spiritual dilemmas and human theatrics within the Church of England--is populated by a cast of excitable, theologically informed Anglicans, most of them very earnest and a large portion of them ordained. Over the course of the four decades described in Glittering Images, Glamorous Powers, and their sequels, these characters interact with the tumultuous life of Starbridge cathedral (modeled on the cathedral in the town of Salisbury, where Howatch once lived), and thrash out relationships as byzantine as any to be found in a soap opera. The resultant conflicts and scandals can verge on the melodramatic, but Howatch gives them an intellectual resonance by making her characters view their experience in terms of sin, redemption, and mystical challenge.

In Absolute Truths, the long but extremely entertaining last volume of the sequence, Howatch turns once more to the narrator of the first one: Charles Ashworth, a scholar of early church history who has reluctantly abandoned academia in order to become bishop of Starbridge. Self-aware, well-intentioned, but not entirely charitable, Ashworth has gained a name for himself by championing conservative values, especially those condemning homosexuality, divorce, and premarital sex. In terms of churchmanship, he has embraced the Anglican "Middle Way," which unites the church's Anglo-Catholic and Protestant wings, and he has learned to mediate when the two traditions battle within his diocese, as they so often do.

By 1965, the year in which Absolute Truths is set, Ashworth has much to be proud of, or so it seems. He has rescued the Starbridge theological seminary, and kept a pornographic sculpture out of the churchyard. He has fought to an uneasy truce with the cathedral's irrepressible dean, an overly creative fund-raiser Ashworth terms a "tough little ecclesiastical gangster." He is married to the generous Lyle, a perfect bishop's wife, and he sometimes has time to work at his books on early church conflicts. True, he is still bothered by the hostility of his biological son, Michael, who is taking advantage of 1960s' permissiveness, and by the priggish manners of his adopted son, Charley. But even Ashworth, so conscious of appearances, knows the lives of bishops can only seem perfect.

Though he does not realize it, he has allowed himself to wallow in complacency, but his state of spiritual sloth is not to last. "God stood by and watched me for some time," he will say when he looks back on the events described in this volume. "Then in 1965 he saw the chance to act, and seizing me by the scruff of the neck he began to shake me loose from the suffocating folds of my self-satisfaction, my arrogance, and my pride."

Subsequent cataclysms fall thick and fast--a little too fast for complete verisimilitude. No sooner has one disaster progressed to the vestry, in Howatch's fictional world, than another is clamoring on the porch. Deaths, seduction, fraud, hysterical sons, mild blackmail, and a secret cache of pornography contrive to batter Ashworth into such confusion that not even thinking sour thoughts about the third-century "sexually lax" Bishop Callistus can give him any comfort. Ashworth's time of trial yields brisk but not completely frivolous reading. Making her story work harder than pure entertainment demands, Howatch arranges events in such a way that they carry out a dramatic examination of Ashworth's favorite Bible quotation, "All things work together for good to them that love God."

"I think that's the most infuriating sentence Saint Paul ever wrote," says Lyle, whom Ashworth learns, too late, has overtaken him in a journey of faith. "Why have you taken to writing it over and over again on your blotter?" The scribbled sentence on the blotter, it turns out, is the second of the "absolute truths" that Ashworth holds dear, the first being that such truths exist at all. Having made its mark on the title, the phrase keeps turning up as a leitmotif until Ashworth surrenders his claim to certainty, and recognizes the darkness that has invaded the life of his beloved cathedral.

Starbridge's architectural masterpiece itself becomes more and more sinister as Ashworth learns that the familiar can present a spiritual threat. After years of depending on his fascinating advisor, Jon Darrow, a former monk with psychic powers, the devastated bishop finds more help in the mysterious and slightly disheveled Lewis Hall, a priest who dreams of founding a healing center. Hall is not only divorced--he also, to Ashworth's horror, likes to wander around the vicarage without socks. Nevertheless, Hall's interest in exorcism--a practice the bishop regards with some skepticism--proves invaluable when Ashworth senses a demonic presence within the cathedral.

In this eerie vision, which comes complete with a ghost, the cathedral seems to be "a monster from some medieval bestiary, a Leviathan hostile to mankind." As the baroque imagery suggests, it takes a real shock to persuade Howatch's characters to release the emotional baggage they've lugged through the years--the old slights, failed loves, the guilt at betrayals of the church. By the end of the book, though, most negative insights have led to positive ones, and the beleaguered Ashworth, at least, has come to terms with the imperfections and absurdities of the present.

Even in moments of psychological strain, Howatch's articulate characters maintain a level of witty and opinionated banter. The repartee can be a little farfetched, but it isn't any harder to accept than the book's slightly creaky plot machinery, which favors characters who phone or turn up on the doorstep solely for the purposes of dropping choice bits of gossip.

It is worth suspending disbelief on both points, though, for the sake of Howatch's wry prose and her impressive ability to string together five-hundred-pages' worth of spiritual and familial crises. Absolute Truths does not require a knowledge of previous books in the Starbridge series, and can be delightful if you don't mind entertainment with a theological tinge.