Mr. Rose

As 'Mr. Rose,' the protagonist exists in the registers of ordinary English life: a man of letters, a failed candidate for the priesthood, a figure whose eccentricities were always anchored to some deliberately fixed point of reason. This formal identity is what the cardinals remember when they consider him, and what the newspapers seize upon when they construct their ferocious caricature of the 'Strange Career of the Pope.' The gap between the mundane Mr. Rose and the pontiff he becomes is the novel's central transformation, and the early chapters dwell in that gap before it closes.