The Minister And The Murderer: A Book Of Aftermaths Stuart Kelly Granta Books £20
This book is not normal, and nor is its author. For a start, it comes peppered with words so unfamiliar – shoogly, fankle, skelf, perjink, dwam, plooks – that they read more like misprints, or as though a small bouncy animal has run amok on a keyboard.
At two different points, Stuart Kelly describes the time he was nearly struck by lightning. ‘It was there before its noise,’ he writes, ‘with a petrichor smell and umber palinopsia.’ His reaction to this singularly wordy lightning was also unusual: he was disappointed that it had missed him. ‘As it crackled and spilt and leapt around like an idiot in front of me… I wanted to be in it – it seemed divine.’
Before the book has even got going, Kelly has singled himself out as an oddball. He dedicates it to his nephews and niece, ‘in the hope that one day this makes sense of your eccentric uncle’. Now, a lot of authors like to boast of their eccentricity, but this usually means that they wear a bow-tie or have a passion for musicals. Kelly is something else entirely. Aged 11, he was, he says, ‘a pious little s***’, who spent his days writing summaries of each of the books of the Bible.
James Nelson, outside his church in Hope Park, St. Andrews, Scotland. Nelson was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1970 after murdering his mother
His confession that he was ‘a strange child’ is justified by the evidence. ‘I used to cry because I thought one half of the bed would be sad if I slept on the other.’ Later, he compares himself unfavourably to his father: ‘He is strong where I am insubstantial, he is attractive where I am shilpit, his eyes are piercing where mine are presbyopic, he is honest where I have been found wanting many, many times…’. Shilpit! Presbyopic! Did the young Kelly suffer a knock on the head from a thesaurus?
Described by the blurb as ‘a Scottish critic and author’, Kelly has chosen to examine the case of another Scottish oddball, James Nelson, who murdered his own mother in a fit of rage in 1969. After his release from prison ten years later he applied, amid much controversy, to become a minister in the Church of Scotland.
The Minister and the Murderer of the title are, then, one and the same person. Though Kelly offers a reasonable amount of detail about the crime and its perpetrator, he is more concerned with the wider philosophical and theological issues of forgiveness and redemption than with the man himself. ‘Nelson for me is a keyhole through which I can see issues and ideas that have troubled and intrigued me for decades,’ he explains.
Nevertheless, the story of the crime and its aftermath is compelling. Aged 24, Nelson was a flash Harry, a joiner by profession, who returned home to live with his parents and his sister after getting into financial difficulties.
Convicted and jailed for the murder of his mother, he later joined the Church of Scotland and became the Reverend James Nelson. Mr Nelson facing the media (press and TV) in May 1984.
One day, when his sister and his father were at choir practice, he got into an argument with his mother. It kicked off after he sat in her chair. By his account, she told him to get the hell out of it, and a row ensued. According to Nelson, his mother called his girlfriend a ‘dirty whore’ and a ‘lazy bitch’, and he lost it. ‘Something just snapped.’ He grabbed his grandfather’s old police truncheon and battered her head, then finished her off with a brick from the garden.
He dragged her corpse to the garage, washed, changed his clothes, packed a bag, and left. He never really offered an explanation, though he suggested it was the culmination of an unhappy childhood. His sister said their father used to beat them. ‘When he started to hit us he forgot when to stop.’ But, as Stuart Kelly asks, if that was the case then why did James kill his mother rather than his father?
His sister visited him in prison now and then, but said, ‘we never really spoke of my mother. On the one occasion we did he called her a whore and that is just not true’. After that, she stopped visiting him.
During his ten years behind bars, Nelson studied the Bible, sung in the choir and learned New Testament Greek. On his release, he studied divinity before applying in 1984 to the Church of Scotland to become a probationary minister.
This was the first time a convicted murderer had ever been considered for a ministry, and the 150-minute debate in the Assembly was, in the words of The Scotsman, ‘emotion charged’. It divided conservatives from liberals and tested the limits of Christian forgiveness. Meanwhile, his father phoned BBC Radio Scotland and condemned him live on air as a conman, a liar, a thug and a cheat.
Kelly is remarkably even-handed in his account of the great debate, and depicts those for and against as people of integrity. Liberals, he says, ‘are as capable as conservatives of digging in deep their heels. The conservative thinks that the liberal will breezily abandon centuries of accumulated wisdom; the liberal thinks the conservative blinkered and hidebound to truths derived from first principles’.
In many ways, James Nelson was not the ideal candidate for the liberal cause. He seemed incapable of expressing heartfelt repentance, sometimes preferring to laugh it all off. Asked why he wanted to be a minister, he replied that he was ‘in it for the money’ and that his ideal parish would be ‘one with a salmon stream at the bottom of the manse garden’.
Later, after he became a minister, his youthful self-indulgence made an unwelcome reappearance. He left his wife for a wealthy widow, arriving at their wedding in a Mercedes, while his bride drove up in a pale blue Rolls-Royce.
The Minister And The Murderer is a collection of wide-ranging essays, each prefaced with a biblical quotation, some of them billed as ‘sermons’, on themes arising from the case. What is the nature of evil? How true is the Bible? Should forgiveness have limits? Can a human being ever be fully transformed? These are profound topics, tackled by Kelly in a wholly fresh and exciting way.
Unlike normal writers, he never mistakes solemnity for seriousness, and refuses to think along prescribed lines. In the middle of an essay on the absence of clerical murderers in crime fiction, he will offer a short history of Cluedo, before calculating the statistical likelihood that the Reverend Green is the killer.
Writing on evil, he gives a vivid account of the time, in the middle of the countryside, when he felt ‘something unspeakable behind me’ and ran home, locking the door behind him. He is also wonderfully subtle and clear on the subject of faith: having gone from passionate believer to cynical atheist, he now concludes that ‘I wish to be the me that believes more than I wish to be the me that mocked belief ’.
On the other hand, his command of the Bible and more obscure texts may overwhelm even those readers who relish his theological zest. Sometimes, when confronted with the sort of sentence that began ‘One exceptionally intriguing work is Abu L’-Ala al-Maari’s The Epistle of Forgiveness…’, I felt the urge to skip.
And there are times when the ostensible subject of his book, James Nelson, appears to be engulfed by the ideas surrounding him. This suggests that Kelly is less interested in Nelson himself than in the philosophical arguments his case provoked.
Kelly asked Nelson’s first wife for an interview, but she said no. He didn’t bother to contact the second wife because ‘I decided that she deserved her privacy’. He visited Nelson’s old parish, and found some parishioners respected him, and some did not, but he doesn’t quote any of them, and his whistle-stop visit is all over in under a page. He is a prolific reader and a remarkable thinker, but I doubt he’ll be winning any awards for investigative journalism.