"Conclave" by Robert Harris

Shortlisted for the 2017 crime/thriller prize in the British Book Awards.

As Dean of the College of Cardinals, Jacopo Lomeli has to organise the election of the next pope. Packed with authentic detail, Conclave charts the intrigues as the secrets and sins of the front-runners knock them one-by-one out of the race to leave them with perhaps the least likely candidate.

Although the twists and turns are perhaps slightly predictable (despite the author's obvious skill in misdirection) and although the suspension of disbelief is challenged by the incredible unlikelihood of the ending, this book is so grounded in reality that it could almost be a documentary rather than fiction.

Another great Vatican-based thriller is The Fifth Gospel by Ian Caldwell.

It's been made into a movie which I review here.

Selected quotes:

• "As with sleep, the more one desired meaningful prayer, the more elusive it became.” (Ch 1)
• “Once, God explained all mysteries. Now He has been usurped by conspiracy theorists. They are the heretics of the age.” (Ch 1)
• “The vices of courtiers all down the ages - the sins of vanity and intrigue and of malice and gossip.” (Ch 2)
• “The one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainly is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.” (Ch 5)
• “Faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt.” (Ch 5)
• “Let us pray that the Lord will grant us a Pope who doubts ... Let him grant us a Pope who sins, and asks forgiveness, and carries on.” (Ch 5)
• “The television producers would be able to spool through their tapes of the ceremony and find the new Pope at exactly this moment, placing his hand on the Gospel, and then his elevation would seem inevitable ... viewed down the long majestic gallery of hindsight, each one shone with the aura of destiny.” (Ch 5)
• “The United Kingdom - that godless isle of apostasy.” (Ch 12)

A good read. 

I first read this in September 2017 and more recently in April 2025. It has 378 pages

It was first published by Hutchinson in 2016

My paperback edition was issued by Penguin in 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Other Robert Harris books reviewed in this blog:

• The Ghost: a well-crafted political thriller about a writer hired to ghost the memoirs of an ex-Prime Minister
• The Second Sleep: dystopian fiction
• V2: will the RAF pinpoint the launch site of the V2 rockets in WWII?

"The Fifth Gospel" by Ian Caldwell

Ian Caldwell co-wrote The Rule of Four, an exciting thriller based around the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an obscure Renaissance erotic dream-work.

Father Alexander is a Greek Catholic priest who lives in the Vatican with his son; his wife has gone missing. He receives a phone call from his brother Simon, a Roman Catholic (and therefore unmarried) priest who summons him to Castel Gandolfo, the Pope's private gardens, where there lies the body of Ugo, a man they both worked with, who was preparing an exhibition which would authenticate the Shroud of Turin (the radiocarbon dating that exposed it as a mediaeval forgery is explained away as contamination) and reveal the Fifth Gospel. It seems that someone is prepared to kill within the Vatican in order to prevent the exhibition taking place.

This is a thriller. The plot sounds like the Da Vinci code. The conventions of the genre are observed. But...

I truly believed in these characters. The relationship between the protagonist and his son allow the author to show that violence is terrifying and destabilising. The human side of the priesthood is brilliantly shown both here and in his relationships with the other workers in the Vatican, many of them drivers or security staff or gardeners, men with whom Father Alexander grew up, men with whom he shares memories of boyhood and football and girlfriends. There is a continual concern about making ends meet in a city state where there is no tax and subsidised food but where the wages are paltry. The religious side is beautifully done as well. Father Alexander shows intense compassion and the acceptance of human frailty; it is his overwhelming love for his family that drives him to do the things he does.

There is one stunning moment in which ordinary people and theology are stupendously mixed. Father Alexander recalls a boyhood excursion to Rome to see an illegal bare knuckle fight. It is sleazy, sweaty, there is a crowd of young kids hooked on blood. "The children were stretching out their arms to touch the fighters who passed by, grabbing the hems of their shorts as if they were a disease they wanted to catch." (p 152) This is a brilliant contrast to the austere world of the Vatican, especially when it resonates with the idea of pilgrims touching relics or lepers touching the hem of Jesus' cloak. Fabulous!

Great moments:

• "Consciences must not get as dirty as bedrooms or dishes ... since they take much less time to clean." (p 1)
• "The darkest mistakes can be forgiven, but they can never be undone." (p 1)
• "Only at the very end of his life did he get a promotion, and it was the kind that came with wings and a harp." (p 2)
• "After Father died, she told me that it felt strange to have hands anymore, what with no one to hold them." (p 2)
• "Every Catholic boy, on the worst nights of his life, goes to bed wondering if animals like us are really worth the dirt God shaped us from." (p 3)
• "The priests reconsecrated St Peter's, the way they always do when a pilgrim jumps. But no one can reconsecrate a child." (p 10)
• "When I told Peter we were safe, I wasn't even being hopeful. I was lying." (p 58)
• "All Christians believe the business of human life is to pay down the debt on old sins." (p 61)
• "Different. He knows this word. A slinky synonym for worse." (p 89)
• "John's word true almost always means the invisible realm of the eternal." (p 121)
• "Life has taught this boy to string nets beneath his hopes." (p 184)
• "He rushes to answer the door and it's like watching a train careen into a dark tunnel." (p 264)

A brilliantly conceived thriller.

Another Vatican-based thriller is Conclave by Robert Harris.

"Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling" by Ross King

How the Sistine chapel was painted with a side order of Raphael working in the Papal Apartments.

The great thing about a Ross King book is that you learn history and history of art and at the same time you find out about the details of an artist's life. For example, originally the Sistine chapel ceiling was covered with stars, typical for vaults of that period, but subsidence led to cracking and an ugly white line of Polyfilla (or its Roman contemporary) across it so they had to repaint it. When Michelangelo started (on the flood scene) he had great problems with discolouration and mildew until someone reviewed the formula for the plaster he was using (which included Volcanic ash rather than sand) and realised he was using too much water. Michelangelo made sketches all the time of everything he saw and regularly reused things from other works of art: he seems to have stolen David's pose from a statue in Rome. Raphael also 'borrowed' often from Leonardo: the contrapposto pose of Eve in his Temptation seems to be a version of a sketch he made of Leonardo's Leda which is perhaps just as well since the original was destroyed Madam de Maintenon, the second wife of Louis XIV. Even just discovering what contrapposto means and why artists use it made the book worth reading! Another example is Botticelli's Venus.

This book is actually three stories woven into one. Michelangelo and his team of assistants are toiling away on their scaffold frescoing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (standing, bending backwards, not lying on their backs which myth arose from a mistranslation of the Italian). Meanwhile Raphael is frescoing the Pope's private apartments with scenes such as The School of Athens. And il papa terribile, the warmongering Julius II, is fighting the Venetians and the French for mastery of the Papal States.

Three immensely contrasting personalities. Julius is larger than life, growing a white beard in defiance of canon law, hunting pheasant with guns in defiance of canon law, and eating, drinking and making love to excess (in defiance of canon law). Meanwhile, Raphael is a sweet young man with an incredibly sunny disposition, beloved by everyone, especially women, from baker's daughters to high class courtesans. And Michelangelo is slovenly, depressive, ugly, and probably chaste, moping about on his own. There is a story that an isolated Michelangelo met Raphael and his crowd of admirers one day and sneered at him for being a 'bravo'; Raphael returned by pointing out the Michelangelo was friendless like a 'hangman'.

There is so much of interest in this story told as usual with Ross King's easy-to-read narrative style. It's wonderful.

March 2016; 296 pages

Other great Ross King books I have read include:

• Leonardo and the Last Supper: a wonderful description of how a great but wayward artist produced a masterpiece
• Brunelleschi's Dome: about how the dome of the Duomo in Florence was built
• The Judgement of Paris: the rivalry between Meissonier (I'd never heard of this great artist before!) and Monet which led to the triumph of Impressionism