The Jealous God

The Jealous God is a novel by John Braine which was first published in 1964. Set in the early 1960s among the Irish Catholic community in a small Yorkshire town, the book is about a 30-year-old mummy's boy and his attempts at liberating himself from his domineering mother. The title refers to the latter's wish that her "favourite" son, although already rather old for following his alleged vocation, become a clergyman. It was said that it was John Braine's personal favourite novel of all those that he wrote and was finally filmed in 2005.

Vincent Dungarvan is a history teacher at a Catholic school for boys. Whereas his two brothers Matthew and Paul have been married with children for many years, Vincent is still single and living at home with his widowed mother, who is also a teacher. At 30 he is still a virgin. He has gone out with one or two nice Catholic girls but has rejected them when he found them too superficial and boring.

One day, in the local library, he encounters Laura, a new librarian. Fascinated by her good looks and driven by, as he sees it, sinful desire, he is for once able to overcome his shyness and asks her out. Laura accepts, they immediately fall in love with each other and start dating on a regular basis. However, he prefers not to tell his possessive mother about her let alone invite her home.

In the course of the following weeks Vincent's life is shattered by a number of revelations concerning Laura. He is disappointed when she tells him that she is a Protestant and that, on top of that, she has stopped going to church altogether. What is more, through a deliberate indiscretion by Laura's flatmate Ruth, he learns that Laura is divorced. For him as a Catholic, this means that he is seeing a married woman, and both his guilt and his helplessness about the situation increase enormously. Accordingly, they break up their relationship.

Surprisingly, soon afterwards Vincent loses his virginity with Maureen, his sister-in-law, while his brother Matthew has gone out and the children are asleep. On the following morning, back at his mother's, he recollects what happened the previous evening:

[…] He had deliberately denied himself the one pleasure that had the power to transform his very notion of pleasure; he had committed all the other sins because of indolence or indifference, never stopping to calculate the price. He smiled; it was the same for the sin you enjoyed as the sin that you didn't.

To spend the day talking to schoolboys about James I was, he reflected over his scrambled eggs, an anticlimax […]. He smiled to himself: if he had been a savage he'd have been entitled to wear some special insignia […].

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