Monk Dawson

Edward Dawson is sent by his widowed mother to be educated at Kirkham, a Catholic boarding school run by Benedictine monks. Conscientious and idealistic, Dawson is persuaded that he has a monastic vocation and joins the community upon leaving school. He soon feels that educating the sons of the rich is an inadequate response to suffering and injustice and so leaves Kirkham to serve as a secular priest in London. Under the eye of an indulgent archbishop, Dawson's radical sermons and provocative articles in the Catholic press gain him many admirers, but they also persuade him that the solutions to human suffering are to be found in social work, politics and perhaps psychology but not religion.
Dawson leaves the priesthood to work as a journalist. He is taken up by a rich divorcee, Jenny Stanten, and becomes her lover. He enters her circle of decadent, fashionable friends and follows a precipitous Rake's Progress towards debauchery and disillusion.
Awarded the Hawthornden Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award


Genre: Literary Fiction