“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” – Galatians 6:9

Ralph Eldred works for a Christian trust, he takes into his home waifs and strays or ‘good souls and sad cases’, he constantly and vigilantly seeks to do the right thing. Yet his efforts are wearing on his wife Anna and his four children. Ralph’s life is about doing good but every other member of his family is sick and tired of it. And the harvest they reap, well, no one ends up being particularly thankful for it.

Set over decades in Norfolk, apartheid South Africa and Botswana this family saga is a deeply sad and tragic tale that Mantel uses to explore questions of forgiveness, faith, good and evil and righteousness by works.

Ralph is brought up in the home of devout Christian legalists under the controlling rule of his father Matthew. Ralph seeks escape but he also seeks justification and vindication. He seeks it in his attempts to ‘do the right thing’ but justification never seems to come. In the end Ralph wearies, his family weary, and at crucial times no matter how hard he tries he cannot do the right thing.

God is present through his absence. The Eldreds are shaped by duty, but God doesn’t seem to come through for them. Their efforts on God’s behalf go unrewarded and leaves them unprotected from great evil. Anna Eldred returns from Africa, bitter, angry, suffering.

I asked God for comfort when I came home to Elim every night, and saw these beaten people waiting for me on the stoep but God kept very quiet, James.

God did nothing. It was up to me to do something, but I acted within constraints – I tried to be good, you see, I felt the love of God biting into my wrists like a pair of handcuffs. So what did I offer these people? Bandages and platitudes. Suppose my training had been different? I might have stepped on the train to Cape Town with a revolver in my bag, I might have shot Dr Verwoerd – then I might have done some good in the world.

That’s the theology of Bonhoeffer right there. We seek to do good but sometimes the good we need to do is stop the madman driving the car. Only Anna doesn’t do that leaving her impotent and frustrated and full of restrained anger. The small bits of good they do seem to get them and the world nowhere. So what, they wonder, is the point?

They have become ‘professional Christians’ but none of the Eldreds, before or after their great tragedy, seem to have a living faith, their hearts have not been strangely warmed. And all these attempts at do-goodery without reward finally take their toll. Ralph has an affair, two children are drifting, one determined to live a ‘successful’ life and the youngest pines, ‘Why can’t we be normal, and self-absorbed, and acquisitive?’

As Ralph’s affair finally comes to light and Anna is faced with the choice of what to do, one last sad case stumbles back into view. The book ends with this heartbroken couple who have been worn down by the outright evil they witnessed in Africa and the quiet, casual, never-ending self-destruction of the poor that they face daily in England once again choosing to do good. And in the final scene, Ralph’s atheist sister Emma is at Walsingham seeing in that in mysterious ways her prayers were answered.