Book review: Of Men and Angels by Michael Arditti

Michael Arditti is a novelist who has grown more ambitious, and at the same time become more accomplished. He is a rarity among contemporary novelists, being one who takes religious faith and its contradictions seriously. His characters are regularly torn between the desire for sexual fulfilment and the laws of God as interpreted by churches. Philip Pullman describes him as being a “chronicler of the rewards and pitfalls of present day faith,” and this is a fair judgement, though in this new long novel religious faith and obedience are examined over the centuries, in five distinct episodes (each introduced by the Archangel Gabriel) that extend from the Jews’ exile in Babylon to Hollywood at the tail-end of the second millennium since the birth of Christ.