It is a religion founded on love and charity, and my cardinals genuinely try to lead that life. “They unfold like a novel, and such a character emerges: a radical, quite tricky and contradictory figure, but still, a human being.

His research for the book began with the Gospels, which he read again, very fast, for the first time in 40 years.

But really, I just love politics in all its forms, and this is the oldest election in the world, and the most mysterious. “He is quite a character in the book, because I knew from the start that these cardinals would believe in God as we believe in electricity. “Though I’d be careful about mocking God,” he says, when we meet for lunch at a Bloomsbury hotel close to where he is attending a workshop for a possible theatre adaptation of one of his books (he has steak and chips, and three glasses of wine). Not that he is a Catholic, or even a believer. Amiable, wise and pink-cheeked, with the same taste for the finer things we have witnessed in certain popes – let us remember Benedict’s red leather loafers – it’s all but impossible, once you’ve read his new novel, not to imagine how fabulous he would look in a white zucchetto, with a cape to match, and a socking great ring on his finger for journalists to kiss as they try desperately not to reveal the sin of envy in his presence (before he was a million-selling novelist, Harris was a hack just like them – and me). But then, from nowhere, new candidates emerge, one of whom is, much to his horror, Cardinal Lomeli.Īs it happens, Conclave’s author has a somewhat pontifical air himself, and I mean this in the best sense of that word, because he is about the least pompous famous writer I’ve ever met. At first, it is a three-horse race between Cardinal Adeyemi, whose victory would make him the first African pope Cardinal Tredesco, a seething, outspoken Italian with traditional views and Cardinal Tremblay, an ambitious but bland Canadian. Lomeli is a good and holy man, but he is suffering a crisis of faith, finding it hard to pray, a situation that is hardly helped by the revelations that now begin to unspool around him and threaten to derail the election altogether. In charge of their various ballots – again and again they must vote, the idea being that with each round, one candidate grows ever stronger until, well, habemus papam – is Lomeli, the dean of the College of Cardinals.

The action takes place over 72 hours inside the Vatican, where the cardinals are sequestered to elect a new pope in a secretive process that dates from the 13th century. But in another way, it’s not contemporary at all. R obert Harris’s gripping new novel, Conclave, has a contemporary setting, in the sense that the year is 2016, or thereabouts.

Conclave by Robert Harris