Review

Ageing

Belief

Books

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29 May 2025

4 min read

Mine eyes have just read the best novel of the year

Quentin Letts’ Nunc! is a beautiful, moving and funny exploration of life, death and first century Jewish cuisine.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A book cover shows a cartoon man sitting on the title text while a dog sits below.

Historical fiction is my favourite genre of novel. Make it biblical historical fiction and you’ve sold me before I’ve cracked the spine! I bought a copy of Quentin Letts’ NUNC! without having read a single review or knowing anything about it… and what a sensible decision it was. Letts has produced a novel that combines his rapacious satirical wit, theological and historical acumen, and a beautiful sentimentality – the novel is dedicated to his brother Alexander, who died of cancer.

It is inspired by the words of the Nunc Dimittis, as translated in the Book of Common Prayer. Sung by Simeon, as he holds the Christ child in his arms, they are words that are full of joy, because God has promised Simeon that he will not die until he has seen the Messiah. “Lord, now lettest thou now thy servant depart in peace,” it begins: words that are spoken or sung at every Evening Prayer in the Church and have provided hope and comfort for generations.

The novel opens with the character of Symons (no, I didn’t misspell it), a titanic literary concoction of corduroy, wax jacket, and mild middle-aged irritation, who lives in a classical English cathedral town. He receives a terminal cancer diagnosis. He has an argument with his wife, Anne (the typology is strong in this novel). He gets pissed. As he totters home from his local wine bar, he passes the cathedral and is captivated by the sound of singing.

Upon entry he realises the choir is rehearsing the canticles for Evensong. He hides behind a pillar and kneels down in a pew. The Nunc Dimittis is rehearsed, and the heady combination of high emotion and fine wine sends him into a prayerful stupor. We are transported to first century Jerusalem and spend most of the rest of the novel in the company of Simeon and a cadre of his friends, acquaintances, and opponents.

What follows is a series of hilarious vignettes, featuring a wide array of brilliantly sketched characters. Spending much of our time in ‘Deuteronomy Square’ we meet Rueben the tea seller, Tambal the slave (who has a fondness for Roman cuisine and a horrid aversion to gefilte fish), Noor the mad garlic seller, Jonah the hypocritical Pharisee, and Shlomo the dog. Through them, and many others, Letts allows the reader to explore the social, political, religious, and dietary life of the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

The humour never vanishes, the confessional power never overwhelms, the lightness of touch is always present; and yet the novel takes on a new intensity...

How did the Judeans feel about the Romans? Were there ever friendships between Jew and Gentile oppressor? How did the average man or woman feel about Herod? What was their attitude to a priestly and religious hierarchy? Were the Wise Men buffoons? Letts weaves such themes through a narrative laden with the humour and heart-warming episodes that mark the best ‘slice-of-life’ writing. The people of first century Jerusalem might be separated from us by time, space, language, culture, and cuisine, but their highs and lows, their gripes and loves, their daily search for happiness and meaning, are no different to ours.

Underpinning the story is Simeon’s daily watch for the promise of the Christ. Letts has ten verses from the Gospel of Luke as a foundation to build his protagonist, and four of these are a song. Undeterred, Letts uses Simeon as a cypher to explore further and deeper themes: youthful indiscretion, regret, passion, love, shame, faith, doubt.

Letts also allows for a certain frisson of imaginative licence to round out his back-story. What was Simeon’s profession? Who were his parents? Did he know Anna the Prophetess? Why had God given him this task of watching and waiting, praying and hoping? Never overexplaining or labouring the point, Letts grants the reader a few moments of memory and introspection from the old man, but otherwise invites us to understand Simeon through his daily dealings with those around him.

By the end of the novel we have not only one of the funniest characters of modern fiction, but one of the most spiritually and emotionally complex. I prepared to leave Simeon – encountering Mary, Joseph, and the infant Christ – feeling as if he was a member of the family.

Letts concludes the novel with Simeon’s great biblical performance: ten verses which suddenly take on a remarkable poignant weight. The novel quietly switches gear to become a theological meditation worthy of any spiritual writer. The humour never vanishes, the confessional power never overwhelms, the lightness of touch is always present; and yet the novel takes on a new intensity and seriousness that took me by the hand and led me to look upon the mystery of life, death, truth, beauty, and goodness.

It took me a while to make it through the final two chapters…my eyes kept misting with tears.

If you only read one novel this year, please let it be NUNC!

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Column

Books

Character

Culture

Time

19 June 2025

4 min read

The true myths we tell about how we got here

Memoirs are the stories that make us who we are

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

I’ve been asked to write a memoir. It’s because I’ve been an Anglican priest for 20 years and it’s been quite a ride – deployed to a tube station when the terrorist bombs went off on 7 July 2005, served the Archbishop of Canterbury as the child-abuse catastrophe unfolded, been the religion editor of a national newspaper and helped countless people to die and to marry as a rural parish rector.

So, I suppose it meets the minimum criterion that a memoir shouldn’t be about me so much as the events through which I passed. But it also raises questions about what a memoir is for, as well as what it’s about. I wonder about its purpose and that leads to choices of style.

I had in mind a hybrid fiction model, in which the only made-up character was me, heightening the drama of it all by being maybe bisexual and a cokehead (neither of which I have been) who encounters all the real and interesting people that I have. That might at least make it a bigger challenge for libel lawyers.

A publisher at lunch this week persuaded me that this is a very bad idea. Commercial fiction is where the action is and literary fiction (even if I could do it) is dead. It has to fit in one of the silos that people will buy – crime, romance, fantasy and so on. And I’m an old, white man, to boot.

But memoir is a good stable, she said, and it didn’t need to be a dull, linear narrative. In fact it mustn’t be that. I’m beginning to think it must be a drama and, as such, as creative an act as fiction.

So, not history. Or maybe, like history, it depends on how you look at it and how we remember. As someone quite famous remarked recently, recollections may vary. And we all have an agenda in relating them. Memoir is not a record, it’s about experience, emotion, interpretation and score-settling (I’m looking forward to that last bit).

The most obvious exemplar of this is the political memoir, which lately has ticked towards being written by the spouses of politicians. Salacious revelation seems to be the currency here, all the better if a former prime minister is alleged to have said he’d like to drag you into the undergrowth and give you one.

Memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub.

One rather hopes, for reasons of aesthetics as much as decorum, that this indicates that memoir is as much about what times were like as about being a simple record of them. This makes sense as I face the prospect, for example, of relating being with a 26-year-old mother of two as she died.

If it’s such an essentially subjective exercise, then memoir is a poor country cousin of history. Some have made it consciously so in their titles – Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs and Python Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography come to mind.

Incidentally, memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub, rather than the marshalling of peer-approved facts. This is what makes it so sensationally subjective. I remember standing alone in a boorish institution, heroically speaking truth to power. You remember a blithering idiot. The difference is I’ve got a publisher.

In this sense, memoirs are the stories that make us who we are. Or, naturally, who we’d like to be, or like to be seen as. In ancient Greek terms, we deploy our mythos rather than our logos, our allegory rather than our empirical reality.

But, again, these stories make us who we are. And not just the stories we tell. The stories of our nations are similarly formative. The stories that the world’s major faiths tell also define us, whether we believe them or not.

The Christian gospels are memoirs. The first three of them attempt to describe what happened. The fourth, John, is rather more allegorical. But they all, in the Jewish tradition of storytelling, in one way or another seek to describe what it was like to be in the insurgent Nazarene movement, as much as what actually happened.

Matthew, the tax-collector, writes for his audience of Jews. Luke is concerned with what it all means for the poor – and not just those economically so. Mark, first out of the trap, wants to consider what it all means for non-Jews. Their recollections may vary. But it’s reckless to suggest that this invalidates their testimony.

My memoir will contain no gospel truth. But there’s no point in embarking on an exercise that is only about what happened over 20 years of priesthood. It has to be about what it was like too.

I think that its epigraph may read: “Nothing in this book happened. Everything in it is true.”