Interview: Scared for us, but more scared of himself

Deborah Ross talks to Piers Paul Read

Homosexuals, abortion, feminism, sex before marriage - all are bad. The Tory party used to be OK, but now that's gone bad. He could go on and on, and he frequently does in the right-wing press. Yet he writes compelling novels, and face-to-face he is a strangely tolerant and likeable man

So, here I am then, sitting next to Piers Paul Read, the great Catholic novelist - or "the Ayatollah of Catholicism," as one of his own brothers calls him - on a big, squishy leather sofa in the writers' room at Cheltenham Town Hall. Piers is a famously stern moralist whereas I am a hopelessly cheerful immoralist, the sort who is exceedingly keen on the sins of the flesh, who thinks gay couples are great because they really look after their gardens.

In fact, I tell Piers, whenever he writes one of his Daily Mail pieces about telly having been given over to "filth" and "sex, sex and more sex," I always get really cross. If there is so much sex on TV, how come I never get to see any of it? Whenever I turn it on, it seems to be vets, vets and more vets, and never even vets and sex, which would, in my opinion, go a long way to making Animal Hospital a great deal more lively. Piers, of course, disagrees.

"But didn't you see the opening episode of Dance To the Music of Time?," he cries. "It began with a naked girl opening a door. A naked girl!" Well, I say, some people think naked women a very fine and beautiful thing. "Yes. But there's a place for it. And that was not the place. There wasn't even a good reason for it." I think, at some level, Piers might be rather frightened of women. And sex. In his latest novel, Knights of the Cross, a naked woman is described as having a pubic region like a tarantula. This is not the friendliest of descriptions, I am sure you'll agree. Although, that said, Knights of the Cross is a very good book.

Although Piers Paul Read has written 13 novels he is still, probably, best known for Alive - his non-fiction account of the Andes air crash survivors - and those regular, Daily Mail right-wing rants. He is called upon mostly, he says, when Paul Johnson is unavailable. "In fact," he says, "I always know when Paul's gone away, because my phone starts to ring." Alive was an international best seller. The Daily Mail pieces are consolingly well paid. They have given him his big house in Holland Park and, probably, whatever fame he has. This is a shame, I think, because his novels (The Upstart, The Free Frenchman, A Married Man) should be what he is best-known for.

Knights of the Cross is about a bloke called Michael Latham, an employee at the BBC's monitoring unit in Caversham, who is both a divorcee and a great disappointment to himself. To cut a very complicated story short, he has to take on the identity of a Russian priest, and infiltrate the Knights of the Cross, a sinister, Catholic, charitable order, to investigate the death of someone he once knew. Of course, the book is dominated by the brooding presence of God, and the ending is not so much an ending as an epiphany. Through taking on the identity of a priest, Michael finds God and, as a consequence, his own identity.

The fact Piers can make this a thoroughly gripping read is a tribute to his narrative panache, his cool prose and his skill at using his beliefs to serve his characters, rather than vice versa, and killing them stone dead. Piers is not just a writer who happens to be Catholic like, say, David Lodge or William Trevor. He is very much A Catholic Writer, one who even, at times, out-Graham Greenes Graham Greene. He is not, as it happens, a great admirer of Greene. His Catholicism was, he argues, quite bogus. "The Catholic Church stands for family, marriage, fidelity, children. He stood for affairs, mistresses, abandoning children." He used to be very friendly with Martin Amis until Martin left his wife for someone else. He won't have anything to do with him now.

He is a man of total moral certitude, the sort of man who would pick Anne Widdecombe from behind the screen, should he ever go on Blind Date. The ordination of women is bad. Homosexuality is bad. Abortion is bad. Contraception is bad. Feminism is bad. Sex before marriage is bad. The Tory party used to be OK, but now even that's gone bad. "I was converted by Margaret Thatcher and her faith in family values. Now, though, the party has gone much, much too far the other way."

Aren't there any moral issues that vex you? I ask. "No," he says. Although, later, he does dither when it comes to the question of oral sex - or "blow jobs" as he so elegantly puts it. "I'm not sure what the Catholic teaching is here, actually. Do you know?" Hardly, darling. I'm an agnostic Jew. Eventually, he concludes that oral sex is probably OK so long as a couple are married, and it leads to full sex with the possibility of procreation. So, no, a blow job for a blow job's sake is not on. Anne Widdecombe would agree, I think.

There is very little he and I agree on. Although it would be wrong to assume his views weren't in vogue in some circles. We meet in Cheltenham because of the literary festival being held down there. He's been invited to give a talk on Catholicism and his work. It is jam-packed. When the discussion goes to the floor, the audience grumble endlessly about Catholics not being Catholic enough, Tories not being right-wing enough, today's moral standards not being high enough. Us liberals might be about to receive a nasty kick up our bottoms.

However, while it is easy to hate what he stands for, it is impossible to hate him. He is highly intelligent. He has the sweet face of a melancholic Tom Courtney. I am fascinated by what it is like to have absolute faith in God, and question him to a tiresome degree. But he puts up with my thick-fingered, agnostic rummagings with infinite patience. Of course, you can never really argue to any good effect with someone who truly believes. But, still, we have many good spats.

Piers, what would you do if one of your sons said he was gay?"

"I would be very sad. It would be wrong."

"Would you prefer him to be clandestine about it?"

"Yes. I do think I would prefer not to know."

"You wouldn't want to know something as important as your son's sexuality?"

"No. Anyway, once they're 18, they're off, aren't they, and don't really have anymore to do with you."

"Is that true?"

"OK, maybe it isn't. Maybe I'm just not a nice person."

Not a nice person? No, probably not, he says. In what way? "I can be nasty in all sorts of ways." I'm looking for an example here, Piers. "Well, when I heard about Dunblane, I felt nothing." Nothing? Even though you are a parent yourself? "I just felt nothing. It was the same with Princess Diana. When someone phoned me at 7am to say she had died, my first thought was: "Yes, but is that any reason to phone someone at 7am?'' But why? He doesn't know, he says. Perhaps, he then adds, "it's because I have a sliver of glass in my heart." Perhaps, I tell him, it's because he is frightened of his own emotional impulses.

He accepts I might have a point. He very much does feel there might be some evil genie within. Later, when we discuss abortion, and I ask him if it can be acceptable in any circumstances, he comes out with a very odd reply. "No. I mean, if my wife were to give birth to a child with two heads, I would want to break its neck and dump it in a bin. But that doesn't mean it is right." You'd want to break its neck? But God, surely, doesn't care about how many heads people have? He cares only about their souls. "Of course. But as I said. I am nasty." Of course, considering yourself full of sin is a very Catholic thing.

Piers' father was Sir Herbert Read, the poet, novelist and art critic and Professor of Fine Art at Edinburgh University. And a married man, when he fell in love with Piers' mother, Margaret Ludwig, a German, expatriate music lecturer who was newly converted to Roman Catholicism. "She'd been to study music in Cologne, where she found herself very impressed by Rhineland Catholicism. When she came back to Edinburgh, she converted to the Catholic Church, then, three months later, ran off with my father, causing maximum scandal, as you can imagine." Piers is the third of four children from this union.

His mother, he says, "never pretended she was living in anything other than a state of sin. But she adored and loved and revered my father, and thought she could make it up to God by, perhaps, raising good Catholic children."

His mother, he continues, was terrific in many ways. "She was very outgoing and lively and amusing and charming and a wonderful viola player." But, in temperament, "she was the very antithesis of the cool, blonde, German stereotype. She was very Mussolini. She was small and dark, intuitive and passionate, and given to the most towering rages. We were absolutely terrified of her. Her rages were horrible. Horrible! Then she would send us to Coventry for days." Once, when he was six or seven, his mother caught him in a barn comparing anatomical differences with Patience, a neighbour's daughter. She was outraged. She smacked him soundly before grabbing him pinchingly by his upper arm and dragging him home, where he was smacked some more and told to never, ever do such a thing again. Girls and their parts must have come across as very scary things from then on.

Yet there is always a good deal of sex in a Piers Paul Read novel. Private Eye even dubs him Pure Porn Read. Perhaps he is simultaneously both fascinated and repelled by sex in the same way, that say, arachnaphobics are simultaneously repelled and fascinated by tarantulas, and can spend hours staring at them in the insect house at London Zoo. Anyway, what did his parents make of his sex in his books? His mother, he says, was always horrified. "She would go around telling everyone she knew: `You must not buy my son's book.'" And his father? "He was shocked and wondered how I knew about such things. Of course, I could not tell him that I had learned them from my mother's imagination."

Ideally, he thinks his father would have liked to have been a great poet. T.S. Eliot was his great friend. The Reads lived mostly in Yorkshire but, fortnightly, Herbert would travel to London to lunch with Eliot. A poem in Cats was, apparently, inspired by one of the Reads' cats, Spitzi. Herbert hoped to be an Eliot himself but, unfortunately, "the creative genius just never materialised." A great intellectual, he became, instead, one of the founders of the ICA and a champion of modern art. Piers says he always found his mother's primitive faith in God much more impressive than his father's reasoned, intellectual faith in modern art.

He adored his father but, yes, he was a confusing role model. Ostensibly a pacifist, he won the DSO and MC fighting in the First World War. A self- professed anarchist, he accepted a knighthood from the state he despised. He was an atheist and virulent anti-Catholic, yet he ran off with Margaret and never tried to undermine her faith. Indeed, as far as Piers can recall, "the only times he objected was when the monks came round and drank all his gin."

Piers was educated, at his mother's instigation, at Ampleforth, a Catholic boarding school run by Benedictine monks, which he detested. He could not take, he says, "the contradiction between God is Love and all the bullying and beating that went on." At the talk, there's an ex-Ampleforth pupil in the audience, who puts up his hand and says he had a thoroughly good time there, actually. "I bet you were good at rugby," says Piers. "I was, yes," replies the man. "I thought so," says Piers. "If you were good at games and sport you were all right. But I was one of those pseudo- intellectual wets who could never stand the thought of being pushed into the mud with a lot of smelly boys." Or pushed into anything with a smelly boy.

Piers insisted his parents removed him from Ampleforth when he was 16, not only because he was dying to get out but also, he later confesses, because he fell in love with a boy in his class. "It wasn't sexual. I doubt it would have even led to an embrace. It was very ethereal." But, still, you felt full of self-disgust? "Yes." He is still disgusted at the thought of homosexuality. "I'm sorry, but I just can not think about it without revulsion." So what is someone who is gay meant to do? "Sublimate those feelings. Pray." Don't you think Christianity sometimes creates more suffering than it relieves? "God's will is always more important than human preferences," he retorts adamantly.

He met his wife, Emily, at a party when she was 16 and he had just graduated from Cambridge. They married two years later, when he was 26, have been married ever since, and have four children. I wonder, though, if he ever had any sex before marriage. "That's a very personal question!" Yes, but did you? "Yes, I did. And, yes, I felt very, very guilty. I confessed to a priest while I was having an affair with a woman. He told me to stop seeing that woman immediately." Did you? "No, I went round the corner to see a Jesuit priest, who gave me absolution." How convenient! "Yes."

Emily is not a believer. She even, he says, regards his Catholicism as an eccentric difficulty. He'll put a crucifix up in the sitting room. She'll take it down. He'll put up a picture of the Pope. She'll remove it. Isn't this difficult for you? I ask. Not at all, he says, "because I love her, and because she is a naturally good person, without having to have any supernatural beliefs." If you can be good without God, then what's the point in having him? "Because some people can not be good without God." As he fears he can't be, I reckon.

Knights of The Cross is published by Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, price pounds 16.99.