The Breath of Night

British author Arditti (Jubilate) tackles issues of faith, class, and corruption, and the relationship between fact and remembered personal experience, in this beautiful double portrait of the Philippines during the Marcos regime and its aftermath. It is also a carefully unfolding mystery. Julian Tremayne, a Catholic missionary in San Isidro who rejects the idea that a priest should concern himself only with the next world, writes impassioned letters to his parents back home in England, chronicling his life there in the 1970s and ’80s. Three decades later, Philip Seward travels to the Philippines at the behest of the family of his late fiancée, Julian’s great-niece. His objective is to research firsthand the details of Julian’s life and death in order to support a petition on the part of Julian’s former parishioners in San Isidoro for his canonization as a saint. Philip’s informants and guides during his quest engage the reader’s sympathies, even when their behavior is frustrating, reprehensible, mundane, or miraculous. Their stories and Philip’s reactions to them form the human backbone of a complex morality tale that in lesser hands could have become a simple foreign adventure. Agent: Andrew Gordon, David Higham Associates (U.K.). (Nov.)