Maybe it’s a post-Blair drawing of breath, but, suddenly, the British state-of-the-nation novel is back in fashion. Last year saw Blake Morrison searching for the country’s soul in South of the River; this spring we are promised several further explorations of the pre- and post-Thatcher era by Philip Hensher, Helen Walsh and Hanif Kureishi. All three, though, will have to work mightily to match the steepling ambition of Richard T Kelly’s promising debut, Crusaders.

Kelly, who has previously written a clutch of film books, mentions Dostoevsky in his afterword (which gives you some idea of his aims), but there is more than an echo in this novel, too, of the grand Victorian social and political set piece. Big, unshowy and unafraid to take its time in laying out its themes or exploring its territory, Crusaders wants to map out a whole region, Kelly’s native northeast, and show how the landscape there (and, by extension, in the rest of Britain) changed between the 1970s and new Labour’s coming to power in 1997.

The central figure in this quest is John Gore, a naive young clergyman, who, after an unsatisfactory sojourn in the West Country, returns north in the autumn of 1996 to “plant” a new church in a run-down, crime-infested corner of Newcastle. Motivated as much by his dead grandfather’s coalface politics as his own wavering faith, Gore throws himself wide-eyed into the community and quickly becomes enmeshed with four locals who dramatically complicate his mission – Stevie Coulson, a one-time bouncer with an unexamined respect for the church and a profitable line in “protection”; Lindy Clark, an attractive single mother fighting neighbourhood disdain and trying to juggle several mysterious jobs; Martin Pallister, a former left-wing firebrand who has thrown over his beliefs to become an opposition MP; and the forthright evangelical priest Simon Barlow, a contemporary of Gore’s at theological college, who questions his classmate’s faith and effectiveness while recognising the threat he poses.

Although Kelly spends a long time setting up his story, shifting back and forth between the past and present of Gore, Coulson and Pallister, plot is not a great strength of the book – the denouement, for one thing, is too rushed. Nor are some of the protagonists, despite Kelly’s extraordinary ability to conjure up a wide array of secondary characters, entirely satisfactory; heavily fleshed out though they are, Gore and the self-righteous Coulson both ultimately seem too naive. But these drawbacks are more than compensated for by the breadth and precision of the author’s portrait of the northeast, by the great strength of his dialogue, and in particular by his ethical sensibility. For all the geographical focus, this is a novel ultimately about faith and morals – morals upheld, morals compromised, morals abandoned – and Kelly’s complex and sophisticated handling of this theme ensures that the reader remains involved until the last page of this long but rewarding book.

CRUSADERS by Richard T Kelly
Faber £14.99 pp540

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