Summary: The final book returns to Charles Ashworth as narrator and revisits many of the themes and characters raised in the previous books.
With all of the series’ weaknesses, Absolute Truths is not only my favorite of the series but one of my favorite fiction books of all time. Again, like my post about Scandalous Risks, I cannot discuss the book without a few spoilers. I will try to keep it to a minimum, so I do not spoil the plot.
The narrator from the first book, Charles Ashworth, is now in the mid-1960s. At the end of the first book, he marries Lyle, pregnant with another man’s child. Ashworth, who had discovered in during the first book that the man who had raised him was not his biological father, but had married his mother to protect her when she had become pregnant, felt like God was calling him to do the same. As we return to Charles as the narrator, they had been married for almost 30 years. Quickly after getting married, they had another son. And then Charles had been a chaplain in World War II and spent most of the war as a Nazi prisoner, eventually ending up in a concentration camp. It was not until several years after the war that the couple settled into marriage reasonably happily. Lyle’s fear over Charles’ potential death had helped her to understand that she loved Charles for himself, not just for helping to save her from being a disgraced single mother. Charles also loved Lyle, but the distraction of his teaching and writing, his work as a bishop, and the seemingly effortless ways that Lyle solved all the problems around her allowed him to take her for granted. That changes early in the book; Lyle has a stroke and dies soon after. (Again, I disapprove of using wives’ deaths as a reoccurring plot device in almost every book.)
A nearly 700-page book about a Bishop’s grief may not be for everyone. But there are so many threads from the series that get raised and appropriately tied up. It is a big ask, but as much as I want to recommend Absolute Truths, it is a book where I think you do need to read the previous books to get the most out of it. And those previous five books are about 2500 pages on top of the 700 pages of Absolute Truths.
More than anything else, Absolute Truths attempts to show that we do not know what is happening inside other people’s heads. We can perceive some, and we can be told parts. But no one, apart from God, can know all. This is a long quote from the book’s last half, and I will quote it without context, but this gives a sense of what I mean when I say the book is about how only God can know all.
“One can never know the whole story about anyone—yet how we all rush to judgement! How we all love to ignore the truth that we know so little about what motivates other people, what shadows from the past distort their psyches, what demons haunt and enslave them. How readily we say with perfect confidence: ‘He’s despicable!’ or: ‘He’s behaved unforgivably!’ or worst of all: ‘I’d never behave like that!’ Yet how dare we pass judgement when so much of the evidence is beyond our reach? No wonder Our Lord said so sternly: ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged!’ No wonder he said: ‘He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone!’ Jesus wasn’t interested in rushing to judgement. He wasn’t interested in ‘keeping up a front’ or scoring points off those who found him intolerable. ‘Love ye your enemies,’ he said, ‘Do good to them that hate you.’ And time after time he said: ‘Forgive,’ and talked of the truth which sets us free … And so we come back again to our own current quest for truth, the truth about one another. As Charles pointed out just now, we can never see the whole truth; only God can see everything. But we can see so much more of the truth when our eyes are open, viewing people as Christ viewed them, than when they remain resolutely closed.”
The first book was primarily about discovering your true self as God had created you to be. Charles, and all of us, are tempted to put up a false front to the world. This is protective, but it also keeps people away. Charles was scared of making the same mistakes as his father in raising him, so in some ways, he tried to do the opposite, creating new mistakes. In other ways, he unintentionally replicated his father’s mistakes. In an attempt to protect children, we can sometimes shelter them inappropriately. In the attempt to not shelter them, we sometimes open them up to harm. In the attempt to allow them to become who God wants them to be, sometimes we do not give them appropriate guidance. I could go on.
It is a small portion of the book, but Charles discovers Lyle’s spiritual journal after her death. He reads it, and the reader can hear a second narrator giving a different perspective on events that we have already seen from alternate perspectives. She felt she was being called to pray for Charles and Venetia from Scandalous Risks. Lyle had tried to serve as a mentor and guide to Venetia, but it hadn’t gone well, and all she felt she could do was pray. Lyle never felt like she was a particularly spiritual person. She was organized, could solve problems, and had a sound mind. But her faith was more intellectual and practical acts of service to those around her. Prayer was something she felt utterly inadequate to do. In this short section, we both get an excellent guide to what it might mean to pray for others, to follow God’s will when we don’t know what we are being called to, and to see Charles from someone else’s perspective so we can see how biased his narration of events had been. Of course, Lyle is limited in her perspective as well. But with the other narrators in the previous five books, the more narrators, the more facets of a situation we can see.
That holds with Ashworth and Aysgarth. The series, in some ways, has been a conflict, or at least a difference of opinion between the two, with both of them seeking out spiritual direction from Jon Darrow, the Anglo-Catholic/Mystic that is the third strand of their relationship. Like how Charles found additional perspective by reading Lyle’s journal, Ashworth and Aysgarth end up in Darrow’s cottage seeking spiritual direction simultaneously on two different occasions. That is not so much a coincidence as their need for spiritual direction because of their conflict. Darrow puts them together in the same room so they can recount their problems from their perspectives. While the reader already has some of the perspectives, there is a revelation when the person they thought had it all together externally is vulnerable enough to share the pain underneath.
The surface-level theme of the book is that Ashworth realizes that his pursuit of Absolute Truths has to be balanced with grace for the specific situations where individuals must be dealt with according to their needs and with a love that sometimes requires different things in different situations. This is not moral relativism but recognition that while God may be able to see how all things fit together correctly, we cannot. There are various discussions about Paul’s statement about all things working together for good. Those discussions have nuance, and overall there is real theological and spiritual wisdom. But the summary finding is that God loves us, and even if we can’t see it all, God continues to be with us and seek our good. This quote is one of those points:
You and I, of course, would see this as an example of the redeeming work of the Holy Spirit. So perhaps one might argue that our task as priests is not primarily to condemn sinners but to facilitate the work of the Spirit so that all suffering, merited and unmerited, may be redeemed. Then indeed we would be able to say with St. Paul: ‘All things work together for good to them that love God.’ What a hard saying that is, and how easy it is to pay it lip-service in the name of piety while side-stepping the task of expending blood, sweat and tears to make it a living truth.
That is partially about putting forth the effort to get into people’s lives so that we express that love tangibly. We cannot take on the role of God in the world. We also cannot abandon the world or those around us. We all have a role as specially created people in the world as we seek God.
Fiction is important to explore what it can mean to pursue God and live in the world. We do not have to experience everything, there are things we can learn by observation, even if that observation is of fictional people.
Absolute Truths by Susan Howatch (Starbridge #6) Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook