Serpent on the Rock: A Personal View of Christianity.

Alice Thomas Ellis, the blunt-speaking British novelist, first came to my attention when a friend handed me a copy of The Summer House a few years ago, a movie version of which had then just had a brief theatrical release. I didn't see the movie (featuring Jean Moreau and Joan Plowright) until it came out on cassette last year, when I found it disappointing. But I read the novel avidly, very much enjoying its astringent wit, clever narrative framework, and jaundiced view of human nature.

I went looking for more of Ellis's fiction, but to no avail. It is not easy to get in the States. Then, one day as I was perusing the English weekly newspaper the Catholic Herald (Commonweal exchanges subscriptions with the Herald), I discovered Ellis in her even more ferocious incarnation as a columnist. The verbal energy and stark moral landscape were once again manifest ("I prefer God to man"), along with a brassy reactionary take on Vatican II ("twaddle"), the modern world, and the host of allegedly mealymouthed bishops who have allowed rank heresy to flourish. All the usual suspects, in other words. Nevertheless, Ellis is compulsive reading, even when she is dishing out patent nonsense--or maybe especially when her irreverence about our loss of reverence reaches fever pitch.

Serpent on the Rock: A Personal View of Christianity is the record of Ellis's "quest" to discover what has gone wrong with the Catholic church. Personal is the crucial word, especially when she is eviscerating feminists and charismatics, the views of New Age doyen Matthew Fox, or the late archbishop Derek Worlock of her native Liverpool, who avoided tangling with her in any official capacity. As best I can tell, the bishop made a prudent decision. (In fact, in May Ellis criticized Worlock following his death, and the Herald discontinued her column.)

Personal also covers the charm of Ellis's passionate, and passionately opinionated attachment to Catholicism. "Teilhard de Chardin's vision of what is desirable," she writes after quoting the cosmologically adventurous Jesuit at his most orotund, "also sounds to me very like my own vision of Hell. If I didn't believe in God I should find the world insupportable and see no reason not to hang myself." And make no mistake about it, Ellis believes in Hell as well as in the devil and especially in clerical garb and the Latin Mass. When at her best, she can make you believe too. (Well, not in her version of a nefarious, Masonically orchestrated Second Vatican Council, but certainly in her fierce devotion to a God who must first be feared and worshiped before he--and He's definitely a he--is approached.)

We learn that Ellis is not only the author of eleven novels and a handful of other books, but was a "carefree" postulant in a religious order in the 1950s (honorable medical discharge), and is the mother of seven, one of whom died in infancy and another at nineteen. Her description of the ineradicable nature of grief and loss is utterly persuasive, as is her matter-of-fact acceptance of the self-sacrifice motherhood demands. Life's in justices are something one learns to live with; violations of liturgical rubrics are not. Her wry views about sex as the world's most overrated pleasure are very amusing, and not unconnected to her dismissal of men as a species of dithering idiots whose fragile egos are matched only by their tiresome sexual ambitions (see, The Summer House). This disdain for men (a Victorian period piece, really) dovetails nicely with Ellis's virulent loathing of feminism. She is a champion, though an irascible one, of domesticity, or cooking and what she calls "the washing up." The teleology of life and love is chores, she cautions, and we have no rest from them until we rest in Him.

Though Ellis can be withering ("Luther, who was...more than a little nuts"), one of the surprises of this book is how earnest she is in presenting the views of those she often caricatures. The late journalist Peter Hebblethwaite and his wife Margaret are interviewed at length. Although she doesn't meet the arguments of "liberals" in any substantive fashion ("I can't see it myself," she will respond), from time to time she allows Hebblethwaite and others to complicate the picture.

Serpent on the Rock has many good moments ("It is futile to make happiness a goal: it is always and only a by-product"), and Ellis is rarely less than engaging as a "quest" companion. But this is a quest that righteously ends up where it began, and thereby lacks the dramatic tension the author is so good at providing in her fiction. "I am no historian, either," Ellis writes before issuing her most damning indictments, "but I subscribe to a theory which holds that the Reformation was the first in a series of loosely related calamities, leading to the Enlightenment, the French Revolution," etc., right down to the "shopping-mall mentality" of today.

Indeed, Ellis subscribes to a great many loosely related and calamitous theories, most of them, it must be said, pure fictions. That is not surprising, or necessarily a fatal flaw, in a writer of such vibrant moral imagination and sure dramatic instinct. However, in making this journey the reader has to remember where the stage ends and the orchestra pit begins...somewhere, it seems, around the Reformation.