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kelbi's review against another edition
4.0
A very sad book about a sad flawed man. Not uplifting but authentic
sadiereadsagain's review against another edition
2.0
I'll start with a positive - this book is incredibly well written. It flows, the prose is beautiful, the story is well-layered and develops at a steady pace. It is insightful, clever and deals with the subject matter in a non-sensationalist and balanced way.
Which is why it pained me to give it such a low rating...but I just can't see past the glaring flaw in this book. And that flaw is that it just wouldn't happen. Teenagers like Mark and Lisa wouldn't hang about with David in the way portrayed (use and take advantage of, yes, but not socialise), and someone like David (no matter how lonely he was or how deep his mid life crisis went) wouldn't have allowed himself to be in such a position with them. Their worlds were just too far apart, their ages too far apart...I just couldn't suspend my disbelief enough to engage with the story. That stopped this being a great read, in my opinion.
And don't even get me (native Scot) started on the anti-English stuff. Again, the author made it too extreme and trashed the believability.
Which is why it pained me to give it such a low rating...but I just can't see past the glaring flaw in this book. And that flaw is that it just wouldn't happen. Teenagers like Mark and Lisa wouldn't hang about with David in the way portrayed (use and take advantage of, yes, but not socialise), and someone like David (no matter how lonely he was or how deep his mid life crisis went) wouldn't have allowed himself to be in such a position with them. Their worlds were just too far apart, their ages too far apart...I just couldn't suspend my disbelief enough to engage with the story. That stopped this being a great read, in my opinion.
And don't even get me (native Scot) started on the anti-English stuff. Again, the author made it too extreme and trashed the believability.
louismunozjr's review against another edition
2.0
Pride Month Read 2023 #5: 2 stars, "It was okay,"... barely.
Part of my education was at Catholic parochial schools, and I was very inspired by the lives of the saints books I read and RE-read. Many of the saints had had a calling, and many also gave up their lives as martyrs. I myself felt a calling during my preteen and early teen years, and while I wasn't also aspiring to some day be a martyr, I was very moved by someone giving up their lives as a martyr.
I bring this up because the main character of this book, "Father David," recklessly gives up his life and livelihood and becomes a kind of martyr, yet it absolutely made no sense, neither in a real-world sense nor at least within the context of this novel. And so while there are some beautiful passages in this book, and there are some interesting things being presented about faith, about purpose, and about some other important life issues, the idea of this priest being so completely out of touch, with himself, with his parishioners, with consequences, with COMMON SENSE, doesn't make me much respect the various authorial choices made and presented. For this and other reasons, I found myself deeply disappointed by the false, unnecessary, and completely nonsensical "martyrdom" of Father David.
Part of my education was at Catholic parochial schools, and I was very inspired by the lives of the saints books I read and RE-read. Many of the saints had had a calling, and many also gave up their lives as martyrs. I myself felt a calling during my preteen and early teen years, and while I wasn't also aspiring to some day be a martyr, I was very moved by someone giving up their lives as a martyr.
I bring this up because the main character of this book, "Father David," recklessly gives up his life and livelihood and becomes a kind of martyr, yet it absolutely made no sense, neither in a real-world sense nor at least within the context of this novel. And so while there are some beautiful passages in this book, and there are some interesting things being presented about faith, about purpose, and about some other important life issues, the idea of this priest being so completely out of touch, with himself, with his parishioners, with consequences, with COMMON SENSE, doesn't make me much respect the various authorial choices made and presented. For this and other reasons, I found myself deeply disappointed by the false, unnecessary, and completely nonsensical "martyrdom" of Father David.
megmcardle's review against another edition
4.0
When you hear that the story is about a Catholic priest, you can't help but fear that you know where you are going. But this delicately written, complicated story takes you many other places. Father David does not fit in in the insular, conservative Scottish town where he has come to be near his ailing mother. He would have stuck out simply for being Catholic in the mostly Protestant north, but his being English and Oxford-educated set him even further apart. The writing is gorgeous, if slightly obtuse at times, and the main character is deeply flawed, but somehow still appealing, if not always sympathetic. Highly recommended.
emzbaa23's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
runkefer's review against another edition
3.0
The writing is beautiful and parts of it evoke Brideshead Revisited. The “present-day” parts, however, didn’t age all that well. Reading this book nearly 15 years after its publication was a bit jarring. Attitudes toward homophobia and Catholic priests and other circumstances of this novel have changed enough that this feels much more of a period piece than I would have expected. The overall atmosphere of the book is reminiscence and contemplation, so it’s not so surprising that the main action comes near the end of the book. But when the inevitable occurs, it’s a little bit of a letdown.
nocto's review against another edition
1.0
Odd book. I'm not quite sure what to make of it.
Firstly, I probably wouldn't have got past the first few pages if I hadn't have been stuck with it for the first 70 pages or so (toddler napping at the seaside and nothing else to read or do). And in the middle I couldn't much have cared about what was happening because I put it down for about a week. The end though, I found really quite interesting, the central character's life has fallen to bits and that's more interesting than the bit before where it was falling to bits.
The narrator is a Catholic priest and the writing feels very old fashioned. I thought I was in a bygone age, and references to shopping in Ikea or terrorism threw me out of time. This is kind of the point though, it works quite well. I just didn't find the largest part of the book very entertaining. Definitely an odd one.
I might try something else by the author because I think he's probably quite good, I just didn't get on with this book really.
alicihonest's review against another edition
2.0
I gave this book a second chance because I was nostalgic for Scottish authors. Still no success. Books about bad things are not necessarily bad, when the book *realizes* that the thing is bad. Be Near Me seeks to romanticize what is not romantic, to cultivate a 'grey area' mentality where the action is black and white.
wordnerdy's review against another edition
2.0
I only read one book on the way to ALA (I slept on the plane, and read the newest issue of Craft magazine), and was really excited for it, b/c I loved O'Hagan's Personality. Unfortunately, this novel involved one of my least favorite plot points--an old dude forming an inappropriate relationship with someone much, much younger. And O'Hagan is way too young to be writing a book about a pretentious old British priest who takes a post in a tiny town in Scotland and forms a friendship with two drug-addled asshole teenagers. The conclusion was extremely predictable, the main character was weak-willed and unlikable, and there was an abundance of interminable dinner parties discussing the situation in Iraq and fine wines. Ugh. C-.
sharonbakar's review against another edition
4.0
Andrew O'Hagan's Booker longlisted Be Near Me is one of those novels stories where you can see disaster looming for the protagonist a long way off, and feel like shouting him a warning. (But would he have listened? Would he have cared?)
Like Zoe Heller's excellent Notes from a Scandal, the novel takes as its territory the human story behind familiar tabloid headlines (in this case screaming about a paedophile Roman Catholic priest).
Father David Anderton becomes the parish priest for Dalgarnock, a small town in Ayrshire, Scotland. He's a fish out of water (Oxford educated, middle-class) in a former industrial town with high-unemployment rates and sectarian divisions as clear-cut as those in Ulster, across the water.
He befriends a group of loutish teens from the local school, and becomes a de facto member of the gang, smoking dope, popping E's, drinking, hanging out. He is particularly drawn to a boy called Mark, whom he kisses (and no more) after a night on a bender. The boy tells his father who then blows the whistle, and soon the the whole community is baying for his blood.
I could appreciate O'Hagan's depiction of the teenagers, having taught classes just like this!:
The pupils were waiting in World Religions. they hung over their desks as if they had just been dropped from a great height, looking like their limbs confounded them and their hair bothered them chewed the frayed ends of their sweaters in the style of caged animals attempting to escape their own quarters. They tended to wear uniform, though each pupil had customized it with badges and belts and sweatbands, you felt they had applied strict notions of themselves to the tying of their ties and the sticking up of their shirt collars. the small energies of disdain could be observed in all this, and the classroom fairly jingled with the sound of forbidden rings and bracelets.
David Anderton is a more difficult character to work out, since we are only gradually permitted to piece together his past. I didn't find him easy to sympathize with - he lacks conviction in his calling, he comes across as weak and ineffectual and simply to be going through the motions of running his parish.
It is a bit of a stretch that a parish priest should be so attracted to a group of yobbish teens that in some senses he seeks to emulate them, but O'Hagan does make the relationship seem credible ... and even inevitable.
Father David is attracted to the teenagers, and particularly to Mark, for their exuberance and their certainty (even when wrong-headed) and perhaps too for their sheer recklessness which contrast with his own lack of conviction and inertia. He clearly takes pleasure in experiencing life vicariously through them.
The title of the book is a line from Tennyson's In Memoriam and, as Hilary Mantel says, (reviewing the book in the Guardian) it is a prayer whispered by this celibate priest on all those lonely nights, still longing for the lover who was killed in a car accident decades before. It's a blow Father David hasn't recovered from. A sense of loss permeates the novel.
Would I recommend the book? Honestly - I'm not sure that it would appeal to the average Malaysian reader who might find it too slow and the setting perhaps too unfamiliar. (I carry the voices of the members of my book club around in my head - I know how they would react!)
But if you enjoy the kind of contemporary British literary fiction which finds its way onto Booker shortlists and longlists, you should find the novel extremely rewarding.
I did enjoy it very much because I so admired O'Hagan's craft: he writes beautifully (although some reviewers have felt that he rather overwrites) and I relished the language. Scenes were so vividly rendered, that I was watching the movie in my head. (British. Arty. Slow.) I also really liked Mrs. Poole the housekeeper whom I felt was particularly well-drawn.
Like Zoe Heller's excellent Notes from a Scandal, the novel takes as its territory the human story behind familiar tabloid headlines (in this case screaming about a paedophile Roman Catholic priest).
Father David Anderton becomes the parish priest for Dalgarnock, a small town in Ayrshire, Scotland. He's a fish out of water (Oxford educated, middle-class) in a former industrial town with high-unemployment rates and sectarian divisions as clear-cut as those in Ulster, across the water.
He befriends a group of loutish teens from the local school, and becomes a de facto member of the gang, smoking dope, popping E's, drinking, hanging out. He is particularly drawn to a boy called Mark, whom he kisses (and no more) after a night on a bender. The boy tells his father who then blows the whistle, and soon the the whole community is baying for his blood.
I could appreciate O'Hagan's depiction of the teenagers, having taught classes just like this!:
The pupils were waiting in World Religions. they hung over their desks as if they had just been dropped from a great height, looking like their limbs confounded them and their hair bothered them chewed the frayed ends of their sweaters in the style of caged animals attempting to escape their own quarters. They tended to wear uniform, though each pupil had customized it with badges and belts and sweatbands, you felt they had applied strict notions of themselves to the tying of their ties and the sticking up of their shirt collars. the small energies of disdain could be observed in all this, and the classroom fairly jingled with the sound of forbidden rings and bracelets.
David Anderton is a more difficult character to work out, since we are only gradually permitted to piece together his past. I didn't find him easy to sympathize with - he lacks conviction in his calling, he comes across as weak and ineffectual and simply to be going through the motions of running his parish.
It is a bit of a stretch that a parish priest should be so attracted to a group of yobbish teens that in some senses he seeks to emulate them, but O'Hagan does make the relationship seem credible ... and even inevitable.
Father David is attracted to the teenagers, and particularly to Mark, for their exuberance and their certainty (even when wrong-headed) and perhaps too for their sheer recklessness which contrast with his own lack of conviction and inertia. He clearly takes pleasure in experiencing life vicariously through them.
The title of the book is a line from Tennyson's In Memoriam and, as Hilary Mantel says, (reviewing the book in the Guardian) it is a prayer whispered by this celibate priest on all those lonely nights, still longing for the lover who was killed in a car accident decades before. It's a blow Father David hasn't recovered from. A sense of loss permeates the novel.
Would I recommend the book? Honestly - I'm not sure that it would appeal to the average Malaysian reader who might find it too slow and the setting perhaps too unfamiliar. (I carry the voices of the members of my book club around in my head - I know how they would react!)
But if you enjoy the kind of contemporary British literary fiction which finds its way onto Booker shortlists and longlists, you should find the novel extremely rewarding.
I did enjoy it very much because I so admired O'Hagan's craft: he writes beautifully (although some reviewers have felt that he rather overwrites) and I relished the language. Scenes were so vividly rendered, that I was watching the movie in my head. (British. Arty. Slow.) I also really liked Mrs. Poole the housekeeper whom I felt was particularly well-drawn.