The Book - I was persuaded to read this book by a friend who reviewed the film well before it won two BAFTAs who said the film was a bit of a cardinal's egg that fell apart half way through. I thought 'read the book, and you can miss out watching it being mangled by the committee of directors, script writers and actors.'. The book was slow at first, lots of minor detail and fussing about procedure where the fuss was a key part of the procedure.
The core of the book is the votes for the next pope where what is revealed about the members of the curia between each vote provides the drama. Each smoothly executed ritual has within it room for human error, room for the works of the flesh to be revealed as part of the drama. The fear of human error was part of the error. The Catholic perfection of ritual is one of the characteristics it is noted for.
The fifth vote fails to secure a two thirds majority for any candidate. From there events take a course for the much more dramatic, and less credible. Secrets kept well hidden in quarters that are meant to be left undisturbed are found out, which reveal serious actions on the part of one of the more popular candidates for pope that make him the least suitable candidate possible. For me the secrets, and how they were stored, seem to have been too easily discovered for their value as secrets to hold up. But I persevered with the book.
From the fifth vote to the last the curia wrangle wit their own internal politics whilst the world outside the Sistine Chapel is reminding the curia that the world is a restless and violent place. The discord of the the world is much more complicated and random than the book keeping of The Catholic Church. Then there is the ending in which the curia choose change in a way that proves greater than they could have foreseen.
I am not going to say how the book ends. But a clue is planted early in the book, and left unexplained until near the end, where the book greatly, but discreetly, expands upon that clue. Then the bureaucracy and flummery of the papacy closes in around the changes that are accepted, whilst highlighting continuity and saying less about what the continuity is a continuation of.
I can't imagine a locked room mystery thriller similar to this low key but compulsive read, unless the book had a title like 'Murder in the Sistine Chapel' in which the reveal of the plot in the title is somehow rendered a mystery in the prose with a similar opacity to that of the bureaucratic decorum the curia show here, to maintain the tension in the reader, right until the end.
St Augustine of Hippo said 'The world is the case', amongst many other quotes. He was writing about a justice a much grander business than a modern locked room thriller which explores as much as entertains. Even with that, hiding/exposing rivalries is as common in Roman society as it has been down the ages. What this book reveals is how shy The Church of Rome is to admit it is part of the world.
The Film
The book presented any film maker with many advantages, architecture, procedure, the oddly buttoned down clerical body language and choreography of the cardinals. The clothing that the cardinals and nuns wear is amongst the more straight forward parts of the book to depict. Harder to depict is the tension of wondering which cardinal will be voted to be the next pope when any of them could be. From the start some cardinals are more likely to be candidates than others. Some would like to be chosen whilst not quite grasping the subtlety of the humility test that has to be passed, where to be chosen for the top job the candidate has to genuinely appear to not want the post in a way that also signals they might be good at it if other people cardinals think they might be an apt candidate.
Two aspects of the film are quite striking, one is the modernity of the cardinals hotel rooms, slab of textured looking grey marble and corridors with deep red wall to wall carpets. How I longed for one of the cardinals to glide along one of these identical looking corridors, where in some stop motion film effect the cardinals feet did not move but his body did and from Ralph Fiennes eyes there was a look that was half way between menacing and other worldly. But alas no such surreal moment was allowed to break the air of sombre sobriety. The other aspect of the film, which was striking but harder to recognise for how it worked was the sound design and the Latin. In the conclave meetings the Latin spoken hid any pride, division and enmity and only rarely did the noise and commotion of the outside word intrude-the book handled that better when occurred than the film did. In the hotel English was spoken, and the tone of it varied from whispers in discreet side areas in corridors left for lit candles to be prayers from whoever lit them to open arguments and declared disagreement. The speech sounded clear but as if it was spoken in a soundproofed room, with a 'deadened' sound to the voices.
Book and film share a major flaw to the plot, where each ignores the flaw as it becomes increasingly apparent in different ways. I won't say what it is, but both strive mightily against this flaw to make the reader/viewer ignore the flaw and maintain the tension, where how the book and film each strive gets the reader/viewer onside to help them hide the flaw. But after the film is over the first conversation where the film or book is pored over will reveal the obviousness of how secrecy can make us go along with what is merely an entertainment, albeit a serious entertainment, posing as being more than an entertainment.
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