maybe a pang of loss, when confronted with someone who has a great being or some far-reaching plan in which to trust in. Waugh abt as good a novelist as one can be (ie as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions. I would not recommend this, had that scene and the ending been changed I think it could have been quite good but it feels disappointing.

As someone who had a notionally Catholic upbringing – I wouldn’t go so far as to say lapsed as I was never convinced to begin with – I felt keenly the contradiction between enjoying all these treasures and thinking that the wealth that purchased them should never have been appropriated from my ancestors in the first place.The candidates themselves (four Papabiles are presented early on) are each hiding secrets whose disclosure would likely cost them the election. Lomeli is on the verge of witnessing history, but even then, there is one more surprise that no one saw coming. The story is narrated by Cardinal Lomeli, one of the Pope’s closest associates, who is tasked with the organisation of the conclave, just as he is struggling with a crisis of faith. It was the ignorance of the reader rather than the fault of the book, but I initially struggled to understand all the terms, places, and activities that were littered throughout. I then put off reading it – partly busy reading other stuff and partly from a slight sense of nervousness that not even Harris could pull off an interesting thriller about a papal election.

I didn’t know, for example, that the black simar worn by cardinals in public has 33 red buttons, one for each year of Christ’s life, or the reasons why the papal thrones were taken away. He remembered riding with the Holy Father in this very car early in his papacy when two elderly monsignors had got in. And whether their heads, their hearts, or their ambition will guide them to a decision will soon be seen.Lomeli is unnerved by the spectacle of so much naked aspirations, but at the same time, he is also trying to control his own ambitious pride. In the novel Conclave our storyteller is Cardinal Lomeli, dean of the College of Cardinals and the man responsible for presiding over the conclave. Lomeli hesitated on the threshold, felt something in his left hand and saw that he was clutching his red zucchetto. You are going to need a lot of zeros after the decimal point before you reach the percentage of representation those 118 embody.