MAGGIE HAMAND'S Virgin and Child describes a brutal war zone of shifting battle lines, a clash between theoretical theologising reflecting papal power and prerogative and the messy truths of personal experience.

ACUTELY TUNED EAR: Maggie Hamand (Photo Barbican Press)

In her novel, Pope Patrick is the first Irish-born incumbent of the Roman Catholic church. A pretty mainstream pontiff, he is nevertheless already raising the hackles of the hardcore reactionaries within the hierarchy.

His calling a conference to discuss the fate of the souls of foetuses that have been aborted and miscarried is a challenge too far for the senior cardinals circling him like vultures.

Other events also conspire to force Patrick to confront the steely platitudes of his denomination’s dogma. He is attacked at a public reception, only to find out that his assailant is his cousin Siobhan, enraged at his church’s teachings on miscarriages.

A few days later he collapses while celebrating Mass and eventually discovers, after consultations with Vatican doctors, that not only is he biologically intersex but pregnant as well.

From this deliciously and precisely balanced narrative pivot, Hamand goes on to relate a tale so humanely, so movingly and with such authorial depth and deftness that the reader would have to be a saint not to read it through in one enormous sitting.

Reeling from these personal revelations, Patrick is faced with exactly the difficult moral choices that millions of women have to confront each year.

This is no absurdist novel and Hamand delves uncompromisingly into Patrick’s torn and conflicted reactions, which alternate between rejecting the child and keeping it.

A particular epiphany comes after another battery of tests: “They were discussing ‘the embryo’ as he had done a thousand times but now, for him, the embryo was not an abstract thing at all. It was something very real inside of him, something whose presence preoccupied him at every moment.”

Inevitably, Patrick’s public intentions and personal predicament provoke an increasingly violent response from others with power to protect.

His increasing reliance on Thomas, one of his two personal secretaries, intensifies the tensions and intrigues. Friend and foe merge into a grotesque merry-go-round of medical examinations, public appearances and urgent and earnest conversations.

Hamand has an acutely tuned ear for the innermost needs and yearnings of the human heart in the face of societal and institutional incomprehension, and Virgin and Child hovers exquisitely in terms of plot and style between the writings of Antony Burgess and Michael Arditti.

Her novel is another worthy addition to Barbican Press’s impressive portfolio of beautifully crafted and utterly transgressive fiction.

Virgin and Child is published by Barbican Press, £16.99.