Doomsyear

By Martha Duffy

IN HIS 44 YEARS, BRITISH NOVEList A.N. Wilson has published 22 books -- and not in just one or two genres. Finish his excellent biography, say, of Tolstoy or C.S. Lewis, and there's a new novel out. After that, a collection of outrageous opinions about the royal family hits the shelves.

The latest book is a novel, The Vicar of Sorrows (Norton; 391 pages; $23), about a lost Anglican clergyman. It represents the author's serious side, but the material is a bit balky. Handsome, remote Francis Kreer, vicar of St. Birinus, no longer believes in God or loves his wife. His troubling daughter Jessica means more to him, but not quite enough. Kreer's decline begins when his mother changes her will, leaving him about half what he expected. Suddenly he finds himself no longer competent to deal with petty parochial rifts. Before long he is besotted with a pretty young hippie, and the affair becomes public.

The book covers one liturgical year. What preoccupies the author is the role of ritual -- the dailiness of religion -- in a world that has largely lost faith. The Kreers are not strong enough characters to sustain that ambitious theme, but there are compensations. Wilson has a lethal grasp of parish politics. He watches gleefully at the plotting of the low-church Spittles, who had poisoned Kreer's mother's mind against him. Seizing the moment, his ecclesiastical superiors finish Kreer off.

The book's high point is a set-piece chapter toward the end in which Kreer's enemies close in and he loses his grip. Mostly it is snippets from self- righteous letters from parishioners (with copies to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Queen) and deadly announcements of custody warfare and collapsed credit. For savagery, it's worth the novel.