Conclave: Robert Harris’s Vatican intrigues

As a brotherhood of 118 holy men meets in secret to elect a new pope, foul play and bitter power struggles unfold.

Detail from the cover of Robert Harris’s 11th novel, Conclave.

Fiction has its fair share of clerical crime-solvers — think GK Chesterton’s Father Brown or Umberto Eco’s Franciscan friar — but none so exalted as a cardinal. That is, until now. Strictly speaking, Robert Harris’s 11th novel, Conclave, is not a crime novel and its 75-year-old protagonist, Cardinal Jacopo Lomeli, is no sleuth.

However, as a brotherhood of 118 holy men meets in secret to elect a new pope, foul play and bitter power struggles unfold, and Lomeli, “whose guilty recreation was detective fiction”, assumes the role of amateur investigator to expose un-Christian deeds and unmask the Judas.

Harris’s 1998 novel Archangel opened with the death of Stalin. Conclave begins with the death of a different supreme leader, a controversial pope whose policies annoyed traditionalists and disappointed liberals.

As dean of the College of Cardinals, Lomeli is tasked with organising the conclave to find a successor who can unite the church. Four main contenders emerge: “aloof and bloodless intellectual” Aldo Bellini; suave but shifty Joseph Tremblay; staunch reactionary Goffredo Tedesco; and a Nigerian, Joshua Adeyemi, with the potential to become the world’s first black pope.

As the cardinals arrive at the Vatican, Lomeli is disturbed by several accrued facts concerning the late pontiff. In his last days he had lost faith, not in God but in the church. He had a strong heart, yet died of a heart attack. News of his death came to Lomeli 2½ hours later.

Then, just before the first ballot (and in a chapter fittingly entitled Revelations), Lomeli’s disquiet is replaced by disbelief when he is buttonholed by an agitated, vodka-soaked Archbishop Wozniak, who informs him that on his last day on earth the pope sacked Tremblay for gross misconduct. Equally sensational is the announcement that an unknown cardinal has shown up in a black cassock with no luggage, fresh from Baghdad. Did the pope appoint him in secret or is he an impostor?

Throughout the novel, Harris teases us with taut, punchy, thrillerish sentences that set a scene, convey a mood, outline a position and hint at menace: “Behind the toughened glass, the spotlit Vatican wall glowed greenish-blue, like an opera set for a midnight assignation, or a murder.” But just as the narrative refuses to take the form of a crime novel, it also defies thriller conventions. Instead what we have is a sharply focused, tightly controlled drama, if not big on adventure then certainly rich in intrigue. “Are you plotting, Your Eminence?” someone asks Lomeli. “No,” he replies, before qualifying it, “or at least no more than anyone else.”

Harris’s drama is made all the more intense by the confined space and claustrophobic limits of his locations. During the election process, the cardinals are housed in sealed, bulletproof chambers in the Casa Santa Marta. “It reminded Lomeli of a Soviet apartment building: a grey stone rectangle lying on its side, six storeys high.” From there they are shuttled to the Sistine Chapel where they remain cloistered under lock and key until all votes are cast and counted.

News trickles in of terrorist activity raging outside on the streets of Rome, but Harris keeps it relegated to background noise, prioritising in-camera machinations over public carnage. There are moments when we wish Harris could up the Machiavellian tactics or reveal more skeletons in closets among rival factions. Less patient readers may tire of the repetitive format, question how much tension can be derived from following a group of sequestered old prelates, and wonder if an end lies in sight.

But despite the odd frictionless interlude and slow-burn of a build-up, the novel eventually flares into life, triggering a series of unexpected sparks. We learn of a nocturnal tryst with a nun and a reputation-sullying love child; incriminating emails; hushed-up accounts of financial skulduggery. “What a devil’s business this is!” remarks one contender. Lomeli races to solve it before a guilty man is elected pope, all the time aware that some candidates have more ambition than others, and that there is no going back on the final decision. “God,” Lomeli is told, “doesn’t do re-counts.”

Lomeli proves to be an engaging creation. He has alarming doubts and, in contrast to many of his peers, liberal views. He is also a man of principle whose covert fact-finding mission is about rooting out bad apples and preserving the sanctity of the church. Conclave boasts a sting in the tale as fiendish as the final twist in Harris’s 2007 thriller The Ghost. The rest of this fine novel is more subtle but just as masterfully executed.

Malcolm Forbes is an Edinburgh-based critic.

Conclave

By Robert Harris

Hutchinson, 304pp, $32.99