The Lent Jewels, by David Hughes

A lyrical struggle with faith, sex and death

David Hughes has written a remarkably engaging book about faith and doubt in the contemporary world. It is remarkable less for the grand subjects he interrogates than for the subtle way he goes about his spiritual inquiry, by taking us back to the Victorians.

Where the 20th century fell into the comparative ease of total disbelief, the 19th still struggled to resolve agonising tensions between faith and doubt. "I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope," Tennyson writes in In Memoriam (1850), the lyrical struggle he writes in coming to terms with death of his beloved Arthur Hallam. Tennyson, arguably, gets there in the end, though it is a tortuous journey. But it's the unshakeable faith of many Victorians, amid and despite the vast social and intellectual challenges of the day, that Hughes finds so significant in The Lent Jewels.

He begins with an extraordinary event that beset one Victorian family. In spring 1856, Archibald Tait, later Archbishop of Canterbury, lost five of his daughters to an epidemic of scarlet fever in a single month. Tait's wife Catharine left a posthumously published narrative of this family tragedy, and Hughes uses it, among other texts, as a way of understanding his own lack of faith. Like other Victorian narratives of loss, what radiates is an unfailing ability to find spiritual solace amid the deaths of all those children. "At night she was in my room, coffined in the volume on the bedside table if I lay awake, but wandering the spaces when I nodded off. Her tragedy was still a closed book, her unique view of it a map I had yet to find a way of reading,"

The Lent Jewels is more complex, however, than the story of a contemporary man of the world, confronting one family's spiritual strength in the face of so much death. For there is another Victorian's story that cuts through Hughes's meditation on faith and doubt, that of the pornographer "Walter", author of the multi-volume My Secret Life. It's a brilliant move by Hughes – to introduce worldly vice so startlingly alongside implacable faith – and one that takes some getting used to for the reader. But, by interweaving the Tait family resolve, Walter's sheer sexual will, and Hughes's own confrontation with his lack of faith and the painful exploration of his sexual maturing, he manages a much more meaningful, poignant exploration of those entangled universals – sex and death.

"Thanks to them and their loss," Hughes concludes of the Taits, "I had got back in touch with things in my childhood that might in age have dried into bitterness." The Lent Jewels becomes a meditation on the workings of memory and the devices we have for forgetting: "From the outset I had been seeking ways of luring my brain onward, tricking my training, making my childhood work for its keep, bringing adolescence to heel, outflanking the defences I built up as an adult, giving my inevitable complacency at seventy a nasty turn or two." As a way of confronting his own ghosts, Hughes's encounter with the past is an elegant, poised and wonderfully humane achievement.