The Wonder Worker.

It's Kleenex time again at the Rectory." So says the retired-exorcist-in-residence at Saint Benet's. No need to worry, though. A spiritual director is on call round the clock. So are a parish priest, a curate, a doctor, several befrienders, and a cook with a Cordon Bleu certificate. This is a rectory in a Susan Howatch novel. Experts abound.

Howatch, an Englishwoman who has written seventeen novels, is a past master of the ensemble-cast drama. With her last book, Absolute Truths, she wrapped up what she called the Starbridge series, "six novels about the Church of England in the twentieth century." Whereas the action of the Starbridge series was concluded in 1965, The Wonder Worker is set in 1988 and deals with alternative healing and "the interface between the medical and the spiritual." Absolute Truths had a plot line about an ex-exorcist who wished to establish a "center of Christian healing" in Starbridge. In the new novel this fellow, Father Lewis Hall, is in residence in a thriving healing center at an Anglican parish in London. For twenty years, he has been the John the Baptist to a magnetic younger priest named Nicholas Darrow.

In the sixties, Nicholas was a "wonderworker" who used his gifts as a hypnotist and psychic to amuse the smart set at Oxford and beguile dangerous young ladies. Now he has a ministry of healing modeled on that of "Jesus Christ, the greatest healer who ever lived." One day, a "fat plain girl" named Alice wanders into the parish's weekly healing service to seek help for a dying aunt. She is transfixed by Nicholas, who is radiant in the pulpit. Not long after, he hypnotizes the aunt, enabling the woman to make peace with Alice. Not long after, the aunt dies with dignity. Not long after, Alice moves in as the new cook at the healing center and begins to be healed of her eating disorder and her low self-esteem.

Not long after that - this is a melodrama - Nicholas's life falls apart. Alice is in love with him and is shedding pounds rapidly. Lewis has fallen for a society dame. Stacy, his curate, may be gay; may be HIV-positive; may be suicidal. And his wife wants to end their marriage. Nicholas's solution to his marital problems is to hypnotize his wife and then seduce her, a "spiritual rape."

Howatch is a moralist, and this episode - and the seventy-times-seven calamities that follow - is constructed so that she can make distinctions, deliver sermonettes, and argue her case for the relevance of religion to contemporary life. The novel turns on the distinction between the "wonderworker," who uses psychic gifts to manipulate others to his own ends, and the Christian healer, who selflessly "offer[s] these powers to God and so ensure[s] they were always used for the good." There is also a running debate between the language of religious tradition and that of popular psychology. "I decide that it's unlikely that Francie is, in the classical sense, possessed," Father Lewis offers at one point. "Much more probable is the theory that the devil could be infiltrating the rectory by riding on a mental disorder which was already present in her ."

When the characters speak that way (and they always do), we are meant to ask: Are these people searching modern believers, or "power-junkies hooked on deliverance, crisis-addicts mainlining on salvation"? For Howatch, that is the question. It becomes clear that the real conflict in the novel is not between healing and wonderworking, or between Christianity and psychology. It is between living one's life according to a theory and taking life as it comes. The healing center is thronged with specialists, each with a theory. And again and again their theories lead them to jump to conclusions and make diagnoses before the symptoms are confirmed.

Alice comes to this Wonderland as an emissary of common sense. She is an English empiricist in a bed-sit, one who names her cat James and gets her best ideas while doing the dishes. She is also meant to be a surrogate for the reader, surrendering her initial skepticism about the ministry of healing - and religion generally - as she is drawn into life at the rectory.

But the reader stays skeptical, because too much of what happens in the novel is ridiculous or unbelievable. A volunteer befriender named Francie smears a dagger with chopped liver and hides it in her purse to convince the others that she is a murderess. Father Lewis earnestly prays for Alice to be delivered of her disordered love for rum-raisin ice cream.

For this reader, then, the real conflict in The Wonder Worker is the conflict between the contrivances of melodrama and the workings of realistic fiction. Susan Howatch creates vivid characters and has a keen sense for the way religion shakes out in their lives. As a result, The Wonder Worker has more religion in it than a dozen books of theology, and it is conveyed to the reader in a way that feels like life - not through symbolism or metaphor, but blended with pop psychology, banter, and the ceaseless white noise of the mind as a way her people deal with what life throws at them.

Unfortunately, Howatch persists in telling her stories in the rickety, ritualized form of melodrama. Like popular psychology, or the rhetoric of Christian healing, melodrama is a useful but limited device, and in the end it obscures the clear sight of things as they are. One wishes that when she ended the Starbridge series, Howatch had also stopped writing melodramas, so that she might have brought her religious sense into a fully convincing and contemporary piece of fiction.

Paul Elie is a frequent Commonwealth contributor.