Four ex-Oxbridge friends in their late 20s are about to become leaders in a church initiative called the Course, a fictional version of the real-life Alpha Course. A religious movement led by a charismatic priest who won't take no for an answer, the Course becomes a way of life for its young, wealthy followers who are encouraged to bring other hip Londoners into the fold for prayers and fork suppers.
Alex Preston's follow-up to his well-received first novel, This Bleeding City, focuses on a strange menage a quatre. The alpha Alpha couple in the group are smug marrieds Abby and Marcus. Except that Marcus is secretly miserable, borderline alcoholic and having serious doubts about his faith. And Abby is struggling to cope with the legacy of several miscarriages.
Hovering around the cosy couple since university days are Lee and Mouse, a non-couple. Lee is the girl every man wants to sleep with. Luckily for them, she wants to sleep with every man too until she discovers the Course and is partially "saved". Pudgy beta male Mouse is Lee's reluctant best platonic friend and the only man she won't sleep with.
At the start, all we know about this group is their devotion to the Course. As events unfold, it becomes clear that they are all confused souls who struggled to cope at university and then clung to each other as life in London became challenging. All four, we realise, have made the wrong romantic choices and are involved with the Course largely to avoid having to face up to this. Amusingly, while Abby, Marcus, Lee and Mouse are supposed to be the "moral leaders" in this world, it takes Rebecca a young woman who has a drunken fumble with Marcus at a party to voice what the reader is thinking. "Seriously, you need to get out of the Course," she tells him. "Those aren't good people you have been telling me about. You're better than that." The trouble is, he actually isn't and he knows it.
Simmering away in the background is a thriller-style plot about the global ambitions of David, the priest, whom I pictured with the looks of Steve Jobs and the voice of Tony Blair ("It's so good to have you guys here!"). Everything is at stake for the four young leaders: if they can't capture the attention of a huge new group of recruits, David's plans for expansion are doomed. And there is a lot of money and prestige riding on the fate of the Course.
This is a cleverly conceived novel, pitched between commercial and literary. It's intensely readable and feels honest and authentic in its intentions and execution. But while it's admirably bold to take on the Christian faith in a contemporary novel, there are problems with this choice of subject. Those who believe in God may struggle with the depiction of the Christian characters, who are almost cartoonishly hypocritical, preaching to others about their "lifestyle choices" (and outlawing homosexuality) but off their faces on merlot half the time, when they're not sleeping with their best friends' spouses or getting dodgy "massages".
On the other hand, non-believers may grow impatient with the intricate descriptions of what goes on at the Course. Some of it is hard to buy into: I could not take seriously the fact that the four main characters were in a Christian pseudo-rock band called the Full Fathom Five (their fifth member, the groovy minister, does a star turn singing in tongues). It's not always obvious whether Preston is mocking his characters and exposing their flaws or asking us to sympathise with them.
In some ways, this gives The Revelations a pleasing ambiguity. Preston's characters may be preachy (although they have serious misgivings about whether they believe in what they're saying) but the novelist himself is not. He lets us form our own conclusions about who is to blame for what. This book is intelligently questioning and analytical about religion generally and Christianity specifically. Despite a moral resolution of sorts at the end, there is no strong sense of a conclusion. This might not be enough for some readers, but luckily I have agnostic tendencies and so felt quite happy with the fence-sitting.
