The pope is dead. So is the premise of the Robert Harris novel Conclave, a high-stakes political thriller, dressed in sacred robes: Only, this time, the crisis is spiritual. Pope Francis inherited a church with a hugely tarnished legacy—fundamentalism, sexual abuse—that he had to steer in the right direction.
A papacy defined by such moral turbulence was bound to inspire fiction, as it did for Harris. But he’s not the only one. Fernando Meirelles’s The Two Popes pits Pope Benedict XVI against Cardinal Bergoglio, each weighed down by their failures. “Change is compromise”, states Benedict in one scene, to which Bergoglio replies, “Nothing is static in nature”.
Harris’s background as a political journalist sharpens his instinct for institutional drama, and Conclave is a logical extension of that pursuit. The rise of ISIS, resurgent nationalism, panic over immigration and the election of a progressive pope are the many events that contribute to this book.
Certainty, a sin
The novel begins with the death of a progressive pope and the cardinals increasingly divided into separate factions. There is the conservative extreme, represented by Cardinal Goffredo Tedesco who despises secularism; his most direct opponent is Cardinal Aldo Bellini, who aspires to a multicultural Christian order, advocates for higher participation of women in the Church, and supports LGBTQ rights. Then there’s Cardinal Joshua Adeyemi, who can become the first black pope, and Cardinal Joseph Tremblay, a man with a media-friendly personality.
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Tasked with overseeing the papal election is Cardinal Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli, a relentlessly introspective man who cannot stop questioning: not the candidates, not the process, not himself.
“My brothers and sisters, in the course of a long life in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end”.
Harris’s background as a political journalist sharpens his instinct for institutional drama, and Conclave is a logical extension of that pursuit.
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This core is preserved in the excellent adaptation that won the Best Adapted Screenplay at the 97th Academy Awards, for good reason. Directed by Edward Berger, written by Peter Straughan, and starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Sergio Castellitto, and Isabella Rossellini, the film remains faithful to its source. The biggest change is the identity of the protagonist. Cardinal Lomeli, an Italian, is changed to the British Cardinal Thomas Lawrence.
Regardless of the new name, the soul of the character remains.Doubt moves alongside faith like in Nanni Moretti’s Habemus Papam, where a newly elected pope, heavy with expectation, slips away from the Vatican’s marble certainty into the restless streets of Rome, searching for a faith he can still inhabit.
Visually, Conclave is stunning: restrained but rich, like a fresco brought to life.
Both Harris and Berger are interested in the tension between belief and uncertainty, not as a contradiction but as the very condition of meaningful faith. To lead while uncertain is to remember that leadership is a form of service, not control.
A historian and believer
In Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, a whisky priest—fallen, hunted, soaked in failure—still staggers toward a God he barely believes he deserves. Greene writes, “There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy—a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.”
In Harris’s novel, the most enduring achievement may be its portrayal of the conclave itself. It’s described with the precision of a historian and the curiosity of a believer. “He sat down, switched on the reading lamp, and angled it over his brown leather folder. He slid out twelve sheets of A5: thickly woven, cream-coloured, hand-made, watermarked paper that was considered to be of a quality appropriate to the historic occasion. The typeface was large, clear, double-spaced. After he had finished with it, the document would be lodged for all eternity in the Vatican archive.”
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Both the novel and the film treat these details with a sacred intimacy. While a thriller, the book guides you through each stage of these extremely secretive elections unfolding behind closed doors. “In the round stove they were supposed to burn the voting papers after each ballot, to ensure its secrecy; in the square stove, they released smoke canisters – black to indicate an inconclusive ballot, white when they had a new Pope. The entire apparatus was archaic, absurd, and oddly wonderful.”
The Vatican, with its shadowed corridors and ceremonial stillness, is a character in itself, a spiritual pressure cooker.
In the end, it’s a story not of answers but of those willing to ask better questions.
Amritesh Mukherjee is a reader, writer, and editor fascinated by the stories that shape our world.
Source:https://frontline.thehindu.com/arts-and-culture/cinema/robert-harris-conclave-vatican-thriller-faith-doubt-adaptation/article69494131.ece