The Celibate

by Arditti, Michael

• ISBN13: 9781569470893
• ISBN10: 1569470898
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-06-01
• Publisher: Soho Pr Inc

Summary

This is the story of a young man with his mind full of God and his heart closed to love. An ordinand, he has had a traumatic breakdown while serving at the altar. The Church has sent him to London, to confess to a therapist rather than a priest. In the course of his confession, he confronts the mysteries of his past: his Jewish heritage, his mother's death, his father's rejection, his wealth, his loneliness. His cure begins as he comes to terms with his own history and he can consider those more troubled than he.
He finds work in the slums of the East End guiding tours of Jack the Ripper's crime scenes. Living in an unfamiliar world of outcasts, rent-boys, fundamentalists, sadomasochists and AIDS sufferers, he is forced to face reality. He finally acknowledges physical passion, first for a humble rent boy and then for a sadistic pimp.
A conference for AIDS workers is held in a village in the wilds of Derbyshire, ironically, a place once devastated by The Great Plague of 1665 - 1666. And it is there that he reencounters Father Jonathan, the priest he had so admired at the time of his breakdown, with whom he at long last exchanges the kiss of peace.