Just in time for the lazy summer reading season, British Catholic author Simon P. Caldwell has released a second novel that combines the genres of modern thriller with, what one might call, sacramental or Catholic realism. 

Lady Mabel’s Gold is stand-alone sequel to The Beast of Bethulia Park, Caldwell’s first novel published in 2022. In the second, we are reintroduced to the first novel’s three central characters: Fr. Calvin Baines, a young Catholic priest, Emerald Essien, a beautiful nurse with a complicated past, and journalist Jenny Bradshaigh. 

In Bethulia Park the intrigue was focused on two doctors who, operating within the proto-euthanasia environment of the National Health Service, merrily culled those they considered the “surplus population.” Set in the confusing days leading up to the March 2020 lockdown announcement in the UK, the plot of Lady Mabel’s Gold involves child trafficking, criminal networks and a mad archeologist seeking fabled treasure in the chantries of ancient Lancashire churches.

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In his acknowledgements, Caldwell refers to his admiration for novelist Graham Greene. But in several interviews, he has also noted his attraction to the work of Tom Wolfe. 

Wolfe was best known for his “New Journalism” style in which he applied literary techniques to his journalism and journalistic detail to his novel-writing. Caldwell is a journalist as Wolfe was, and brings a level of intense physical specificity to his fiction-writing. Combined with the Catholic characters and themes, Caldwell writes not with the tropes of magic realism, in which there is a blend of naturalism and fantastical elements, but with those of a Catholic or sacramental realism. 

Caldwell layers the Catholic content in his novels until his created world is shot through with not only sacramentals, such as the 12th-century crucifix which plays a critical role in the story, and sacraments, but Biblical themes, English Catholic history and, crucially, the moral reckoning at the heart of every individual story of redemption. 

The magnetism between Fr. Calvin and Emerald, and the attendant temptation, is a plot thread that weaves the two books together. At the outset of the novel, the emotionally fragile Emerald witnesses a murder and is cast in an emotional heap onto the bed of the priest.

Caldwell describes in excruciating detail the moral musing and prayerful movements of Fr. Calvin’s conscience as he struggles to resist his sexual attraction to Emerald.

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“He also invoked the protection of the Virgin Mary — not from Emerald but from himself. He didn’t fear the wounded beauty at his side. It was his desire for sex with her, and especially while she was in a mentally and emotionally vulnerable state, that was to be avoided. He cooled, and grew more acutely aware of his responsibilities to her, and of her dignity, and was glad he exercised restraint.”

Cassandra Nelson, Visiting Fellow in Literature at the Lumen Center, published a book at the beginning of the year that carries the same name as her earlier First Things essay, A Theology of Fiction. Nelson has made a study of the life and ideas of Sr. Mariella Gable, an American Benedictine and academic who was largely responsible for fostering interest in the novelists of the mid-20th-century Catholic literary renaissance. Gable thought long and hard about Catholic fiction. 

In her introduction to Our Father’s House, an anthology published in 1945, Gable describes the different “targets” of Catholic fiction using the metaphor of an archery ring. The outer ring is the “local colour of Catholic life,” something that would have been more obvious and tangible to American readers in 1945: Marian processions, Ember days or the steeped Catholicism portrayed in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1953 film I Confess. The second ring are ethical issues, like birth control, euthanasia or race relations, portrayed in ways that align with Catholic teaching. At the heart, or the bullseye, are the inner workings of the individual soul seeking to live as a genuine Catholic.

All three targets are struck in Caldwell’s novels. The outer ring, even in a modern, secular, once Protestant setting, is portrayed in a way that goes deep historically as well as touching on the surface elements. There is a kind of deep Catholicism referenced by Caldwell — layers of English Catholicism, historical and yet numinous, that lie hidden and dormant beneath the secular exterior.

Much of the action of the novel is subterranean. In the burial chambers of parish churches, in the tunnels dug below those chambers by the criminals searching for crusader treasure and in the abandoned shafts of the Lancashire coal mines, thieves, villains and heroes root about in the dark, tunneling towards either redemption or damnation.

One of the most compelling sections of the novel is the description of the physical journey of an escape that is a protracted metaphor of the divine rescue of every mortal soul. Rocky, a career thief who had stolen the Chemillé Cross from a community of cloistered nuns, makes his escape through an abandoned coal mine and literally emerges from the earth reborn. On his exit from the bowels of the Earth he is soaked in physical water, muck and blood and is close to death, but he is also covered in the spiritual blood of the Lamb and will seek the healing waters of baptism. Gazing on the stolen crucifix, he becomes a type of the Good Thief. “Remember me, Lord, when you come into your kingdom.”

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There is a lot going on in this novel — at times a bit too much. Names, dates, book titles, types of guns, specific amounts of money, descriptions of arcane bits of Lancashire coal-mining history, local mystics, Old and New Testament themes, all conspire to overwhelm the reader. Certain characters are well-defined, like the vicar general Msgr. David Wickham or Jenny Bradshaigh, others seem to merge into each other in a confusing villainous mix. Perhaps that is the point. Perhaps Caldwell gives the morally complex characters shape and definition whereas the ruined characters are left to slip and sink into the Lancashire mud.

In Lady Mabel’s Gold, Caldwell gives readers another wild literary ride but one that driven about on a thoroughly Catholic terrain: physical, ethical and moral.