AUTHOR PROFILE
MICHAEL ARDITTI
The award-winning author talks to Margaret James about portraying faith in his novels, and writing from a position that allows the imagination to soar
Margaret James
Novelist Michael Arditti’s award-winning work features a wide range of protagonists drawn from ancient and recent history, and also from contemporary life. His latest title is The Choice and is set in the present day. It introduces the reader to Clarissa Phipps, a middle-aged female priest who came late to being able to pursue her vocation, and whose ministry is in a picturesque, tightly-knit rural parish where conflicts and tensions might at first sight seem subdued or even trivial, but which are still very much there.
St Peter’s, the church of which Clarissa is rector, is a beautiful mediaeval building, and in it is displayed a series of more recent paintings by a local artist. Seward Wemlock’s private life was, to put it politely, unconventional, and his legacy is therefore tainted in all sorts of ways.
‘Since I wrote my first novel The Celibate, the nature, purpose and practice of religious faith have been constant themes in my fiction,’ Michael says, and The Choice paints a hugely sympathetic portrait of a woman doing her best to follow her vocation, while she also tries to be a good wife and mother: to give her unfaithful husband and her confrontational, aggressive teenage son what she hopes is a normal family life, to offer her parishioners the best pastoral care, and to lead an exemplary Christian existence.