The liner notes call it "…[A] tale of God, sex, love, self-analysis and forgiveness…"  Believe it or not, such a billing would normally NOT entice me to reallocate valuable reading time from another title with promise for a more profitable pursuit.

This time, though, I was challenged.  On the one hand a trust friend had recommended Susan Howatch's "Church of England" novels.  On the other, I was told of a rather horrified reader who found the story eminently offensive.

This, then, was one of those times I had to find out for myself.  I jumped in with both feet.  And I never came up for air!

How Susan Howatch, a woman, manages so well to enter and describe the psyche of Charles Ashworth, a priest in the late 1940s Church of England, is surprising.  Her themes are equally surprising, and seem to have been largely missed in the various review excerpts that appear on the covers and the first pages of the novel.

First, this is a novel about maintaining a public persona that reflects the truth of who we are in public.  When our "Glittering" public images do not really mirror our true selves - our real lives - emotional breakdown cannot be far away.

From my point of view, though, this is above all a novel about God's sovereign action in our lives.  He is constantly preparing us for what's to come.  We must live our lives with public and private image in sync so as not to miss the opportunities he sends our way - sometimes for our own personal salvation.

There isn't one spare situation or line of dialog in this book that can be spared.  Every single event is a necessary stepping-stone to the final life-purpose of Rev. Ashworth.  The ugly bits, the bad words, everything.  Nothing in this novel is gratuitous.  Every illicit relationship reveals not just a flaw in character, but strengthens the clarity of moral failure - sin if you will - when held up against the "Glittering Images" of who we are in public; when compared to what we know to be the right road, the "straight and narrow".

"Glittering Images" is divided into three parts which give an idea of its complexity.  Part One "The Mystery" is followed by Part Two "The Mystery Beyond the Mystery" and Part Three, "The Call".  It's that overwhelming, all pervading sense of mystery that carries the reader along, pell-mell, always wondering where it'll all end.

But end, unfortunately, it does, leaving the reader with a sense of a personal journey just as profound - and if understood correctly, just as transforming - as the one Rev. Ashworth has taken.

In the end, surprisingly, "Glittering Images" was time well spent.

(Fortunately, there are five more titles in the "Church of England" series - not all as absorbing, perhaps, but all equally revealing of the human condition.)