Topping Ireland's hardback non-fiction bestseller list, ahead of such populist competition as Nigella Lawson's Nigella Bites, Tim Clayton and Phil Craig's Diana: Story Of A Princess and Elaine Showalter's Inventing Herself, is a prayer book. Atheists may argue that The Glenstal Book Of Prayer is, by their definition, not non-fiction. Then again, it's not fiction - at least not provably so - either. So, neither simply factual nor solely imaginative, this is a bestseller without category in the crude world of commerce. That says something.
Ostensibly, it says that people are seeking spiritual sustenance at a grossly material time. No doubt some are. It might even be argued, though hardly convincingly, that the popularity of this prayer book indicates a form of retro-devotionalism - a desire to recreate traditional Christian Ireland. Alternatively, perhaps it points principally to the kind of nostalgia which catapulted 1996's Faith Of Our Fathers CD up the music charts. But such explanations are unsatisfactory. There's more to it.
This is not, after all, any prayer book. It is The Glenstal Book Of Prayer, the second word of its title adding a cachet which, for example, The Christian Brothers Book of Prayer could not achieve. This is because this seemingly unlikely bestseller is an exemplar of premium-brand spirituality - Gucci Christianity, if you wish. As such, it combines the majesty of the ages with the marketing of the present. Media coverage, of course - in particular a Morning Ireland radio slot on July 11th - has ensured that the book is a publishing phenomenon.
Its sales to date in Ireland (it can also expect to sell well in the US) have reached 9,500 and demand is so great that the reprinting of a further 10,700 practically guarantees that a minimum of 20,000 copies will be sold here. A final figure approaching or even topping 30,000 copies is not unrealistic. At £9.99 a copy, The Glenstal Book Of Prayer is on course to praise God and satisfy Mammon. Given that mega-marketed rubbish is frequently the main financial winner in publishing, the prayer book's success is practically miraculous.
"It is being bought by a cross-section of people across different age groups," says the Columba Press public relations and marketing manager, Brian Lynch. "There is something about the Glenstal name and Glenstal way of life, even if people have become disillusioned with conventional religion. A notable feature of its sales is that many people are buying a couple of copies, which strongly suggests that it's being bought as a gift as well as for its own sake."
Ciara Byrne, academic book manager with Eason's, agrees that many customers are buying more than one copy of the book. "We have no scientific study of the kind of customers purchasing it, but from on-the-floor observation, many buyers look to be in their 40s but are not necessarily typical of church-goers," she says.
The book has, it seems from merely anecdotal evidence, a cross-class appeal, but one which particularly attracts disaffected members of the materialistic middle class. That being so, there is, of course, a risk that The Glenstal Book Of Prayer might suffer from A Brief History Of Time syndrome. Back in 1988, Stephen Hawking's "accessible" account of the nature of time and the universe was bought by millions. However, it proved inaccessible to the vast majority. Despite making, in publishing terms, a monumentally big bang, it gradually disappeared into the black holes of attics, basements and book-shelves devoted more to display than to reading. Time will tell.
Glenstal Abbey was founded in a Norman-style castle set on a 500-acre estate, with streams, lakes and woodlands, in Murroe, Co Limerick, in 1927. The first Benedictine community in Ireland since the Reformation, its monks run a farm, a guest house and an elite boarding-school for boys. The school can be considered a Free State answer to the almost four-centuries-old Benedictine Ampleforth College (England's foremost Catholic boys' public school) in Yorkshire.
With Glenstal up and running, the sons of Ireland's Catholic upper middle class no longer had to emigrate to receive a Benedictine secondary education. In a church notorious for its Machiavellian power struggles, the Benedictines have characteristically been identified not with politics but with aesthetics. You might argue that art and politics are inseparable, but the Benedictines have been synonymous with a beautiful performance of the liturgy, with learning (acquiring and imparting knowledge), and with humane and courteous ways of living in a religious community.
Their critics may charge that they promote and maintain a world of privilege, which, in the context of a wider world of gross inequality, is inexorably political. But their focus on aesthetics in relative luxury - at least by the standards of religious orders - has resulted in their being identified primarily with civilising and sophisticated cultural values. Hence their premium brand name and a cachet that has not been damaged by the litany of scandals which has devastated the Irish Catholic church in the past decade.
The Glenstal Book Of Prayer is itself an artefact created with a consciously aesthetic dimension. A small-sized hardback and just 159 pages in length, it has a missal-style page-marking ribbon and prints of two renowned icons from Glenstal's Icon Chapel. Visually and tactilely graceful, it has the apparently effortless harmony which consciously commercial "designer" items seek but rarely achieve. It is a prayer book, but it is also a petition extolling simple elegance.
In five sections, the book includes matins and vespers; familiar prayers; ritual prayers and blessings with a Celtic tone; psalms and quotations from the Rule of St Benedict; and lastly, a calendar of saints' and feast days. Father Simon Sleeman, editor of the prayer book, believes there's "a natural hunger in the Irish for prayer" and agrees that it is the combination of such spiritual searching with the Glenstal "brand" name, media coverage and, with worldly good sense, the fact that there is obviously a "gap in the market" for this book, that has made it a success.
Whether the gap existed before the book or since its publication is a matter for conjecture. On the face of it, spirituality and marketing suggest a somewhat unholy alliance, a bizarre conjunction of contemplative introversion and vacuous extroversion. Yet, whatever people's motives for buying The Glenstal Book Of Prayer, there is undoubtedly a strong belief that it has an authenticity which the wider Catholic church in Ireland currently has not.
"What is prayer? It is commonly held to be a conversation . . . Much has been written about prayer and, further, prayer has been widely experienced in the history of humankind," wrote Pope John Paul II in his 1994 bestseller, Crossing The Threshold Of Hope. These assertions are incontrovertible, but beyond such simple, indeed mundane, observations, even a pope writing about prayer cannot but recast assumptions as facts.
When, in the same book, the Pope writes the sentence, italicised for emphasis, "In prayer, the true protagonist is God", this is presumably theologically sound. But theology is not a form of provable knowledge. (Perhaps nothing is ultimately provable, but clearly some things are more provable than others.) So, it's difficult not to conclude that commentaries on the uses and meanings of prayer are among the most esoteric and arcane writings imaginable.
Better then, if you are so inclined, just to pray. No doubt psychologists, anthropologists and even sociologists have theories about prayer and its effects. But it is hard to believe that all the accumulated knowledge, speculation and belief about prayer can count for much beside the act of praying itself. At a time of dwindling church congregations, with greater atomisation in a competitive society, most people are that little bit more reclusive than their parents' generation. Within a mutilated public service, we are made more hermit-like.
Perhaps that too underpins personal yearnings to converse in a form and at a level less superficial than is encouraged by a material world. Certainly, if commercial advertisements are the prayers - or, at any rate, the characteristic invocations - of the present, it's little wonder that people should seek a return to quieter, more internalised ways.
Then again, St Benedict himself said: "A man is recognised as wise when his words are few." Even though being wise and being recognised as wise are not, of course, quite the same thing, you can heed the saint's advice and ignore all of the above because it's probably unwise, if not downright foolish, to speculate on why a prayer book has become a bestseller in 2001.
It just has, even if the explanation of its success remains just as mysterious as God Him(Her)self.
Amen.