Absolute Truths
The author’s most famous and well-loved work, the Starbridge series, six self-contained yet interconnected novels that explore the history of the Church of England through the 20th century.Charles Ashworth is privileged, pampered and pleased with himself. As Bishop of Starbridge in 1965 he 'purrs along as effortlessly as a well-tuned Rolls-Royce' while he proclaims his famous 'absolute truths' to a society which he sees - with rage and revulsion - as increasingly immoral and disordered. But then a catastrophe tears his life apart and confronts him with the real absolute truths, truths which so shatter him that he finds himself stripped of his pride and struggling for survival. Grappling with the revelation that he has failed his wife, short-changed one son and distorted the personality of the other, Charles's guilt steadily drives him into the immoral and disordered life he has condemned so violently in others. Fighting against the threat of complete breakdown, he then embarks on a quest to rebuild not only his private life but his professional life, a quest which leads him to a final battle with his old enemy Dean Aysgarth in the shadow of Starbridge Cathedral.
Читать Absolute Truths онлайн беплатно
Susan Howatch
ABSOLUTE
TRUTHS
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1995
Copyright © Leaftree Ltd 1995
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780006496885
Ebook Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN: 9780007396375 Version: 2017-05-04
‘A tour de force … Susan Howatch has been likened to a twentieth-century version of Trollope. To make such a comparison is to fail to do her justice’
Church of England. Newspaper
‘Howatch writes thrillers of the heart and mind … everything in a Howatch novel cuts close to the bone and is of vital concern’
New Woman
‘Riveting … extremely moving and often very funny … She is a deft storyteller, and her writing has depth, grace and pace’
Sunday Times
‘She is writing for anyone who can recognise that mysterious gift of the true storyteller’
Daily Telegraph
‘One of the most original novelists writing today’
Cosmopolitan
‘The best female writer in Britain today’
Birmingham Evening Mail
This book is dedicated to all my friends among the clergy of the Anglican Communion (and in particular the Church of England) with thanks for their support and encouragement. My special thanks also goes to Alex Wedderspoon for his great sermon preached in Guildford Cathedral in 1987 on the eighth chapter of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, verse twenty-eight.
‘Absolute truth is a very uncomfortable thing when we come into contact with it. For the most part, in daily life, we get along more easily by avoiding it: not by deceit, but by running away …’
REGINALD SOMERSET WARD (1881–1962)
Anglican Priest and Spiritual Director
To Jerusalem
‘No doubt it would be more suitable for a theologian to be absolutely pickled in devout reflection and immune from all external influences; but wrap ourselves round as we may in the cocoon of ecclesiastical cobwebs, we cannot altogether seal ourselves off from the surrounding atmosphere.’
AUSTIN FARRER
Warden of Keble College, Oxford, 1960–1968
Said or Sung
I
What can be more devastating than a catastrophe which arrives out of the blue?
During the course of my life I have suffered three catastrophes, but the first two can be classified as predictable: my crisis in 1937 was preceded by a period of increasingly erratic behaviour, and my capture by the Germans in 1942 could have been prophesied by any pessimist who knew I had volunteered on the outbreak of war to be an army chaplain. But the disaster of 1965 walloped me without warning.
Ten years have now passed since 1965, but the other day as I embarked on my daily journey through the Deaths Column of The Times, I saw that my old adversary had died and at once I was recalling with great clarity that desperate year in that anarchic decade when he and I had fought our final battle in the shadow of Starbridge Cathedral.
‘AYSGARTH, Norman Neville (“Stephen”),’ I read. ‘Beloved husband of Dido and devoted father of …’ But I failed to read the list of offspring. I felt too bereaved. How strange it is that the further one journeys through life the more likely one becomes to mourn the loss of old enemies almost as much as the loss of old friends! The divisions of the past seem unimportant; we become unified by the shrinking of the future.
‘Oh God!’ said my wife, glancing across the breakfast table and seeing my expression. ‘Who’s died now?’
Having answered her question I turned from the small entry in the Deaths Column to the many inches of unremitting praise on the obituary page. Did I approve of this fulsome enactment of the cliché
