Father Joe: the man who saved my soul Tony Hendra Hamish Hamilton, 255pp, £16.99 ISBN 0241143144

Tony Hendra first met Father Joseph Warrilow in the 1950s when he was 14, a Catholic boy sent from Hertfordshire to Quarr Abbey to receive a rap over the knuckles for having an affair with a married woman. In the endearing figure of the Benedictine monk, with his knobbly knees, flapping ears, stammer and "big pink hands like rock lobsters", Hendra found a second father, a spiritual guide and, perhaps more importantly, his only real friend. Over nearly 40 years of frequent visits to Quarr, Father Joe pulled the rug out from under Hendra's pretensions with disarming grace, always surprising him (as he surprises us) by the "mighty meekness" with which he saw the world. The teenage Tony, enraptured by the order, the liturgy and the single-mindedness of the cloistered life, determined to become a monk. Father Joe instead persuaded him to take up his place at Cambridge where, after a year of diligent daily attendance at Mass, he underwent a dramatic conversion. While watching Beyond the Fringe, Tony decided, with the zeal of the convert, to become a satirist.

After that, Catholicism, Mass-going, religion and even God were all forgotten as Hendra got stuck into his new vocation. He became editor of Spy magazine, an original editor of National Lampoon and a co-creator of Spitting Image. He still made regular visits to Quarr for gentle consultations with Father Joe, but by now Hendra was drinking heavily and taking too many drugs. He proved to be a disastrous husband and father and, after his first marriage broke up, he embarked on a second that soon looked to be heading the same way.

Even from the glassy summit of fame and success, Hendra's life looked pretty bleak. Not a man to deal in half-measures, he made a visit to Quarr and came away convinced that he should never have abandoned his original vocation. He offered himself to Father Joe as a postulant and waited for peace. But Father Joe told him he wasn't meant to be a monk, and sent him back to New York to fulfil what was, for Hendra, the harder task of being a decent husband and father. Slowly, creaking somewhat, and without the certainties of the past, he returned to Catholicism. "I might be of the world but there's nothing to beat a hefty hit of monastic peace."

That, pretty much, is the sum of Father Joe: the man who saved my soul. But a bald summary is misleading, for, perhaps surprisingly, this is a powerful and moving book. Hendra is an infuriating narrator in many ways, but his flashes of painful honesty are as pleasingly startling as his colossal vanity and lack of self-awareness are irritating. He writes in two registers: Tony describing, with meticulous consideration, his love for Father Joe, or listening to the music of the Divine Office; and angry, prickly, whingeing Tony, bludgeoning the reader with his desire to demonstrate how clever he is. He is a satirist on auto, pitching tired platitudes: the Queen is "an inbred old parasite"; Margaret Thatcher "a rabid old grocer's daughter". Yet just as we weary of the relentless bile, we are disarmed by an encounter with the monk:

"Are you saying, Father Joe, that in the matter of motives, or even morally, there's not ultimately much difference between me and my targets?"
"I'm afraid not, dear. If the result is that you only have a personality other people shape. If you really exist only in other people's minds."
"I think you've just described celebrity."
"I've just described pride, dear."

Father Joe has been a hit in the United States, where spiritual journeys can become bestsellers. British readers are warier, but I was surprised by how authentic the book feels, how genuinely moving an account it presents of a particularly contemporary kind of life. It moves us despite its lack of resolution: at the end, Hendra is as cross and pleased with himself and as dismissive of others as he was at the beginning. He is desperate for humility, but we suspect that he wants to be more humble than anyone else. In the end, Tony, scourge of the conservative establishment, returns to a post-conciliar Catholicism where he is outraged by "the hideous practices of the new and improved Church". However, it is precisely this juxtaposition of the man who does not know himself and the man who knows him so well that makes this book ring true. Above all, and despite its demons, it is a testament to love. Which is always a good thing.

Lucy Lethbridge is books editor of the Tablet

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