Transcript of CS#102: Piers Paul Read The Death of a Pope

Transcript of Interview with Piers Paul Read about The Death of a Pope. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

The Death of a Pope at The Catholic Company.

http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1006121/Death-Pope/

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Chris Cash:  This is the Catholic Spotlight, the show where we talk about what’s new, cool and exciting in the Catholic marketplace.  I’m your host, Chris Cash, Director of E-Commerce for Catholiccompany.com, your source for all your Catholic needs.

Today on the spotlight, we have Piers Paul Read.  He is the author of the new novel.  This is a Catholic thriller novel.  We don’t have too many of those out.  It’s called The Death of the Pope and it is getting a lot of attention in the media due in large part to the fact that it is kind of a neat thriller, lots of excitement but in the same time, it is very faithful to the teachings of the church.

Mr. Read, welcome to the show.

Piers Paul Read:  Thank you.  Thank you for having me.

Chris Cash:  Can you tell us just a little bit about yourself?  I know you have written a wide range of other books on many, many different topics.  Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Piers Paul Read:  Yes.  Most of my books are novels.  I’ve written about 14 or 15 novels now but I also wrote the lives of the story of the Andes survivors which was about the plane crash in the Andes and that was nonfiction.  I wrote that about 35 years ago now.  I’ve written a history book about the Templars, the Knights Templar, the crusading knights.  I’ve written a nonfiction book about the Chernobyl disaster.  I’ve written about Alec Guinness who was a very good Catholic and a friend of mine, the actor Alec Guinness, and books on other subjects.

Chris Cash:  Absolutely.  What was it that drew you to writing a Catholic thriller?

Piers Paul Read:  I’ve written a few thrillers before.  There’s no one thing that brought this novel to my mind but it opens at a trial at what we call The Old Bailey which is the central criminal court in London and I was a juror in a trial so that gave me an idea of the opening.  I’m very interested and have been in the question of liberation theology.  I went once to El Salvador to write about the civil war there and the role of the Catholic Church in that civil war so that was another factor.  The question of AIDS in Africa, it’s very much used now as a stick below by the Catholic Church particularly in Britain.  I have of an epigraph of my novel a quote from a British journalist called Polly Toynbee, a very influential columnist who said, “The pope kills millions with his teachings on AIDS.”  All these things came together, also the fact the conclave of the death of Pope John Paul II, who was going to be the next pope.  Was it going to be a liberal?  Was he going to change the teaching of the church on all sorts of contentious issues?  All these things came together to suggest a kind of story that would illuminate these issues but would also be a sort of good, exciting story at the same time.

Chris Cash:  Now can you tell us about the setting of the novel and what’s going on?  Obviously you’ve already mentioned the conclave.

Piers Paul Read:  It opens at this trial.  The central figure is a Spanish Basque former Jesuit who was once a Jesuit in El Salvador.  He left and joined the guerillas, and at the end of that civil war, he was employed by a big Catholic aid organization in Africa.  He is on trial for trying to obtain poison gas and he mounts a very unlikely defense saying that he was using it because he was working in Darfur and he wanted something that would deter the Janjaweed, the militias from attacking the women and children who they were looking after in refugee camp.  At first, you think this is a ridiculous defense but he is so charismatic and so inspiring that the jury believe him and he is acquitted.

Now watching this trial is two journalists, a girl called Kate Ramsey who’s taken with this charismatic character, decides she wants to go out and write a piece about him and eventually goes with him to the refugee camp in Africa to which she’s being transferred.  But also there was a second journalist, a young man called David Kotovski who is in fact an analyst at British Secret Service, British homeland security.  I think you call it MI5.  His colleagues don’t believe that this man, Uriarte is as innocent as he seems.  They think he’s up to something.  He’s planning some kind of terrorist atrocity.  So that’s how the novel sets out.  You follow these two young people with their different takes on this charismatic central figure.

Chris Cash:  Now the themes of this book are around terrorism, around the choice of the new pope and some of the intrigue that goes on in the midst of that.  Can you set up that a little bit for us?

Piers Paul Read:  The characters are a little interlinked.  There are three priests.  Take this girl, Kate Ramsey who’s a sort of lapsed Catholic but she has an uncle who she’s very fond of and who’s very fond of her who is a Catholic priest in London but also goes to the Vatican on church business.  A former friend of this priest who is now a cardinal, a Dutch cardinal in the carrier, a liberal cardinal and some people think a good candidate for the next pope.  This cardinal has a secretary, a Spanish monsignor who isn’t liberal at all but is rather a conservative particular when it comes to the liturgy.  All these characters get interwoven as we pass through the death of Pope John Paul II into some intrigues around the conclave as to who would be the next pope.

Chris Cash:  Especially when you’re referring to the Vatican, the characters aside from Col. Ratzinger and Pope John Paul (II), how many of them are real live people and how many of them are fictional.

Piers Paul Read:  They are fictional.  They’re not fictional in the sense that they’re fantastic.  I mean they’re quite branded in what one knows about the state of the church.

My Dutch curial cardinal is fictional.  There aren’t…  Well, there certainly at the time wasn’t a Dutch curial cardinal.  But I think his view is very similar to a lot of liberal cardinals in the Catholic Church and so I think he’s a credible character in that way.  I think my priest, the uncle of my heroine is very credible as a more conservative divisionist priest who’s been slightly marginalized by his liberal bishop back in Britain.

They of course are invented characters but I think that they’re grounded.  They’re certainly characters who could exist.

Chris Cash:  Where did you get your ideas for your characters that needed to be in this in terms of what issues were important to them and what issues needed to be brought out in this book?

Piers Paul Read:  I think to some percent the novel is a kind of debate within me to my younger self which was very keen on liberation theology and thought.  The Catholic Church should do something radical to solve the problem of the poor in the third world.  If that meant quasi-Marxist revolution then so be it.  My older self which thinks that this is a completely wrong interpretation of what the church is about that really the church is concerned with supernatural and spiritual values, and the world to come, the soul and the body.  So there’s that kind of debate that takes within me in my lifetime.  It’s expressed in the view of some of the characters.

Also my half-children who have stopped practicing the faith and I think probably the discussions between the uncle and his niece are the sort of discussions I might have with one or my two daughters about the modern moulds and manners.

But the characters do take on a life on their own.  I mean one of the joys of writing fiction as against a nonfiction and I’ve done both is that you create these characters, and suddenly they do things and say thing which you hadn’t anticipated.  That’s part of the excitement of writing fiction.

Chris Cash: I’ve seen other reviews of your book out online already.  Some of the people are praising the way that many of the liberals that you portray in the book as well as fall-away Catholics and others who are not truly inline with the church that you have done a great job of portraying them as real people with real concerns instead of some cartoonlike version of a person who is just stupid and doesn’t really get anything. Do you care to comment on your development of these characters as well as their growth arc through the story?

Piers Paul Read:  Yes.  I am, I think, what you might describe as a conservative Catholic and in the end my sympathies are more with the priest, the uncle who’s a priest.  But I think it’s not good writing to just make characters mouthpieces and make a novel a kind of homily in which you’re preaching your point of view and not letting the other side get a look-in.  Sometimes rather, I do my liberal characters do the best arguments.  I certainly want to create credible characters and I want to leave it to the reader to decide which side they’re on.  I don’t think a novel is a very good novel if they’re just propaganda for one particular point-of-view.

Chris Cash:  Now who’s your favorite character in the book overall?

Piers Paul Read:  That’s like saying, “Which is the favorite of your children.”  I don’t think I have one.  I mean as I say, I think I’m in sympathy with the priest but it also has to get under the skin of all these characters and I think he’s got to love his heroine.  I’m very fond of my heroine, Kate, even though she’s fallen away from the faith and had some values I wouldn’t share.  I’m fond of the young heroine.  I don’t think I have a favorite.  I mean this charismatic Basque liberationist who is the strongest character in the book in the sense of a focal character of the book is perhaps someone I might have been in another life if my life had gone in a different direction or as St. Thomas Moore said, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Chris Cash:  Now how much research went into developing the storyline for this book?

Piers Paul Read:  A certain amount.  Like I said, I’ve been to El Salvador.  I’ve written about liberation theology in El Salvador and liberation theology in general.  In fact in a book, the piece I wrote is republished by Ignatius in a book called Hell and Other Destinations which is a collection of my writings over the past 20 years.  That volume opens with an interview I did with Hans Küng for example back in the 1980s.  So I’ve always had an interest in these issues of which way the Catholic Church is going and quite early on took the view that this liberal Catholicism and this social Catholicism, this teaching that the church is all about social welfare and not about saving souls was wrong, and so I’ve sort of had a lifetime of arguing against that view.

Chris Cash:  Did you do a lot of research in terms of going to the Vatican to kind of map out how events would happen in the conclave?

Piers Paul Read:  Not that much personally.  I mean I think I’ve got the facts right about the conclave and what goes on.  A lot of it’s from books and online even.

I think as a novelist you want the readers to be convinced that what’s happening could happen but I wouldn’t say that my novel is a novel to be read if you want to learn about the inner workings of the Vatican.  I really think the authentic nonfiction books would do that.

Chris Cash:  I understand.

Well, we’re going to take a short break here to hear from our sponsor but in a moment we’ll be back with Piers Paul Read to talk more about The Death of a Pope from Ignatius Press.  This is the Catholic Spotlight.

(scoring)

Chris Cash:  We’re back with Piers Paul Read talking about The Death of a Pope, the new and exciting Catholic thriller novel about terrorism and the change of guard at the papacy.

In terms of the terrorism, where did your influence come for putting together that intrigue as well as what kind of things the terrorists might be looking to do?

Piers Paul Read:  I don’t want to give away the plot too much.

Chris Cash:  I understand.  We don’t want any spoilers here.  That’s for sure.

Piers Paul Read:  No.

There is I think less in American than there is in Britain a quite strong animosity against the Catholic Church, a quite sort of secularist hatred of Catholicism.  I mean Catholics are considered anaphobic and the teaching on birth control is very unpopular.  But…

Chris Cash:  Those things are meant to exist fairly strongly here as well.

Piers Paul Read:  Does it as well?

Chris Cash:  I don’t know comparatively between and Britain how much stronger they might be in Britain but it’s certainly…

Piers Paul Read:  I think you’ve got some people who are publicly prepared to admit that they’re Christians here.  In Britain, people who even if they’re Christians tend to keep their heads down and this business of AIDS in Africa and the church being against these condoms and protection from AIDS in Africa is seized upon by these anti-Catholics as a stick for which to beat the Catholic Church.  That is an issue that comes very much into the model.  The heroine goes to the refugee camp in Africa and experiences the horrors there and some of the material I adapt, sadly enough, came with her permission from the e-mails sent to some friends of mine by their daughter who was working with the sisters of Mother Theresa in Ethiopia.  They are sort of graphic descriptions of the terrible plight of people suffering in these camps in Africa.  That gives that side of the argument but of course the story moves on.  They move on.  That question of AIDS in Africa and the church’s teaching on that is very much part of the novel.

Chris Cash:  …which is still an extremely hot topic here in America as well as over in Europe.

Now I know that this novel is not a silk box for you to stand up on and kind of beat your beliefs into people but what kind of influences do you bring in to help mould people’s thinking a little bit maybe in favor of the church’s teachings on things or how much do you do that in a soft way?

Piers Paul Read:  I think, as I say, I give strong arguments to all sides but what sort of happens in the media particularly in Britain is that the church’s teaching just doesn’t get a look-in.  People don’t really know what’s behind the church’s teaching on contraception and AIDS in Africa.  Through the tradionist priest who’s Fr. Luke, I am able at least to express the church’s teaching through a sort of sympathetic character.  I mean he’s not a fantastic priest.  He’s getting old.  He likes watching television, westerns and gangster movies because he feels the good guy wins and it’s clear who the good guy is.  So he’s not a sort of perfect priest at all but I hope that they attract a character.  Certainly the heroine, Kate, is extremely fond of him and he’s in the past a shoulder to cry on.  He sympathizes with her and listens to her about her troubles with her love life without being judgmental and too kind of preachy.

Chris Cash:  Who do you base your conservative priest on?  Was there a specific priest in your background who…

Piers Paul Read:  No, I’ve got many friends who are priests.  I suppose he’s my what you would call an alter ego.  I went to a Benedictine school and I think it’s being taught by Benedictine monks.  There’s always something of the monk or the priest in you.  I never thought of becoming a priest because I always wanted to have children even from quite an early age.  It all carefully follows away as kind of eminent of a priest within one and I put that into the character.

Chris Cash:  Did The Da Vinci Code and the writings of Dan Brown have any influence on the development of this novel just from the standpoint of how popular it is and how much it has attacked the church?

Piers Paul Read:  When The Da Vinci (Code) came, I didn’t read it at first.  Finally, I was sent a preview of the copy by the publishers.  I looked at this and thought this is rubbish so I didn’t read it.  I sent the book off to the charity shop.  But then later, I was asked to review called Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code and actually that review is in those volume of verses published by Ignatius.  So I had to read The Da Vinci Code and this book concluded that there wasn’t much to it in The Da Vinci Code.  It’s mostly fiction and I certainly from my book study of the Templars, the Knights Templar realized that almost everything he writes about the Templars in his book in complete nonsense.  I wouldn’t mind that.  I mean I think novelists should be given a pretty free hand if they want to spin fantastic stories out of history.  My criticism of Dan Brown is he begins the book by saying, “This book is ruled based on fact,” and the fact as we now know comes largely from a book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail which came out in the 1980s.  In fact, the authors of that book have tried to sue Dan Brown in London saying he pinched their material.  They didn’t succeed.  But that book is nonsense.

The book I reviewed, this book by *** [00:21:10], I think he’s a professor of theology in North Carolina who said, “I love the book.  It’s very exciting,” and all that sort of thing but he says that when he comes to the apocalyptic gospels which Dan Brown says were sort of censored by the early church because they made Jesus out to be human, be married to Mary Magdalene and that sort of thing, he says that actually the opposite is the case.  The apocalyptic gospels note Jesus had to be a fantastic figure.  He was a giant of 100 feet high and things so all sorts of complete nonsense.

As I say, I don’t mind people having fun with history novels but I think they shouldn’t pretend that what they say is actually true.

Chris Cash:  I’m sure that you’re getting a lot of comparisons at least in the secular media to The Da Vinci Code just because of search-based primary.

Piers Paul Read:  I don’t mind it being thought of as a Catholic Da Vinci Code.  Let’s hope it does as well as The Da Vinci Code.

Chris Cash:  You can take any publicity you can get, right?

Piers Paul Read:  I will.

Chris Cash:  What’s great about your novel is, even if they’re not sympathetic to the church, they will at least hear some of the real reasons why the church does that they do if nothing else.

Piers Paul Read:  That’s what I hope.  A lot of the fiction which deals with the Catholic Church is anti-Catholic.  I mean the *** [00:22:32] which was heft in the Middle Ages.  The bad guys are always the pope and the bishops.  The stories of Philip Pullman, they’re very anti-Catholic.  So I think Catholic novelists should try to some extent fight back and put the church’s point-of-view.  You can’t force anyone to share your beliefs but at least you can explain what you believe and why you believe it.

Chris Cash:  What Catholic authors had the most influence on you?

Piers Paul Read:  I’m a great admirer of Chasten and then in my youth there was Graham Greene and *** [00:23:08].  I think to some extent they had media time because in the ‘50s when they were writing, most of Britain was Christian.  There was a sort of Christian consensus.  Graham Green could write novels with kind of miracles in them and indeed *** [00:23:25] writes that there was a kind of miracle at the end.  Those novels sold in large numbers.

But nowadays, the sort of atheist Darwinian antireligious view is so prevalent that if you write a novel with miracles in it, people would sort of laugh at you and say, “This is ridiculous.”

I think the sort of climate of opinion for a Catholic novel is tougher now than it was in those days but they were great writers.  They were wonderful writers.

Chris Cash:  When you wrote this, were you writing it as a Catholic novel with that in mind or was it just this is a great story that I feel like needs to be told?

Piers Paul Read:  I think a little bit of both.  Another advice to me was not to make this novel too Catholic as to put off a secular reader and I thought for once I’m going to write a novel about the things that really preoccupy me.  For example, I have my priest talking about the Eucharist in the novel which my non-Catholic friends say, “You can’t talk about that sort of thing in a popular thriller.”  But I thought why not.  For once, I’m going to write a novel from the heart about the Catholic characters, Catholic Church and at the same time make it as an exciting story which incorporates love, sex and all the issues that are relevant to people today.

Chris Cash:  This is focused around the conclave and the pope.  Do you talk about papal authority much?

Piers Paul Read:  Not directly.  Implicitly, it comes into it.  Again, the liberal sort of conservative divide comes into it.  I’m quite pleased with my curial cardinal, my liberal Dutch curial cardinal because again he’s a sort of plausible character.  Actually, he’s based on the cardinals I’ve known but there are elements of him which come from mine.  I’ve known both cardinal and archbishop in Westminster.  He is certainly not based on them but I think he’s a character who could have existed.  I mean I think in America, Cardinal Bernardin or…  I don’t know quite who your liberal cardinals are but there is a difference even now, I think, in your college bishops between the more liberal-leaning and the more conservative-leaning bishops.

Chris Cash:  Yes and they are easy to pick out.  We won’t name any names today but people who are of the conservative bent are going to know who the more liberal arms of the church are.  We certainly pray for them and when they are in authority over us then we certainly also obey them because that is part of being orthodox.  It’s recognizing that your bishop or cardinal is the chief liturgist of your diocese and is to be obeyed.

Piers Paul Read:  He is to be obeyed, yes.

Chris Cash:  We’re running about out of time now.  Did you have any other things that you wanted to share with our listeners before we have to go?

Piers Paul Read:  Yes, I wouldn’t want anyone to read the book out of a sense of pious duty.  I’d want them to read the book because they think they’d have a very enjoyable and indeed moving experience in reading it.

Chris Cash:  Right.  So if you like intrigue, if you like thrilling plots and fast-moving plots then this is definitely the kind of book that I would recommend to you.  I’ve got a copy here on my desk.  I haven’t had a chance to read it yet but I’m looking forward to it.  Honestly, I just got it in the mail yesterday so…

Piers Paul Read:  Right.  Well, I hope you enjoy it.

Chris Cash:  Thank you, Mr. Read.

Piers Paul Read:  Thank you.

Chris Cash:  All you listeners out there, go out and pick up a copy of this book, and have a great day with it.

God bless everybody.

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Transcript of Interview with Piers Paul Read about The Death of a Pope. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

The Death of a Pope at The Catholic Company.

http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1006121/Death-Pope/