MANY of us may have had various volumes in The Observer’s Books series on our bookshelves. The first was published in 1937, The Observer’s Book of British Birds. I think I had a copy along with the those on cathedrals and old English churches. But, among the 98 official titles in the series there was, sadly, not The Observer’s Book of the Clergy. Michael Higgins’s slim volume fills that gap.

Higgins clearly has a love and a deep and intimate knowledge of the various clergymen (I use the term advisedly, as Barchester included no ordained women) who occupied livings, deaneries, and bishops’ palaces in Trollope’s ecclesiastical novels. To use the Prayer Book phrase, they were “all sorts and conditions of men”.

In his Covid-lockdown book, Higgins draws our attention to 12 of those clergy, from the obsequious Obadiah Slope to the saintly Septimus Harding, the spineless Bishop Proudie to the powerful Archdeacon Grantly. A picture is painted of each of them, the qualities that made them admirable priests, and the proclivities that led them from the straight and narrow path. Then, to show that nothing really changes, Higgins has invented 12 more contemporary clergymen who display similar character traits, people we might meet in the parish, on Synods, in our cathedral, or holding up the bar at a smart London club.

It turns out to be both an amusing and slightly sobering book. “Are clergy really like this?” I was left asking myself. “Have we learnt nothing? Are selection processes and the work of the Wash House at Lambeth, Ministry Division, BAPs, colleges, and courses still churning out the same old same old?” And if they are, and if it is true, then we might be led to ask: So who am I? What do people observe in me and my ministry?

In his postscript, Higgins, who in his long full-time ministry has ministered in parishes and a cathedral, besides treading the corridors of Church House, Westminster, acknowledges that things have changed. All I can say is, Thank God; but thank God, also, that the clergy do not come in uniform shapes, sizes, or temperament and are as diverse as the birds in the first Observer’s Book.

The Very Revd Andrew Nunn is a former Dean of Southwark.

Archdeacon Grantly Walks Again: Trollope’s clergy then and now
Michael Higgins
Sacristy Press £12.99
(978-1-78959-331-0)
Church Times Bookshop £11.69