Prayer by Philip Kerr – review

Moved in mysterious ways: a Billy Graham rally. Photograph: Keith Bedford/Reuters

The premise of Prayer, Philip Kerr's first standalone novel in a decade, is tantalisingly creepy. A series of high-profile atheists have died in mysterious ways, and FBI agent Gil Martins is moved to investigate when he hears a startling confession from a frightened woman: she says they were killed by prayer. Initially sceptical – he's a Catholic turned evangelical Christian turned atheist himself – Martins is soon dragged into a world peopled by menacingly charismatic pastors, avenging angels of death and dark, angry gods.

Kerr was one of Granta's best of young British novelists in 1993. He has won prizes for his writing in the past, but he's unlikely to scoop any gongs for Prayer, unless it's the Bad Sex award (more on which later).

This is a baffling novel, an uncomfortable mishmash of horror and serial-killer thriller which doesn't quite manage to succeed as either. It's narrated by Martins, who starts off as an intriguing companion, struggling with the loss of his faith (his wife kicks him out for his secret stash of Dawkins and Hitchens), and with burgeoning OCD. But his voice – and personality – quickly chafe, from his attitude to women (he looks at a colleague's underwear when she climbs a tree, and refers to a woman's "great badonkadonk"), to his pettiness (questioning a witness whose cheating husband has just died, he decides to "pay her back for jerking my collar so violently earlier on", and brings up the affair).

As Martins stumbles his way towards the truth – via handily discovered secret journals and video diaries – he ends up at an evangelical church with a huge congregation and a powerful leader, who doesn't take kindly to his investigations. And, amid chatter about ancient texts and "nothing less than the secrets that God revealed to Adam", Martins is, eventually, threatened himself, feels stalked by something implacable and ancient, and wonders if he is cracking up entirely.

Giving Kerr his due, once he gets going, towards the end of the novel, he is capable of summoning up a genuinely scary atmosphere and a satisfyingly malign presence. But this doesn't rescue Prayer. The dialogue is clumsy; his first-person narrator even addresses himself aloud, at one point: "'It's not that you're any better than a lot of other bastards in the Bureau, Martins,' I said… 'it just takes a while longer for you to give up on something.'"

The story is too slow-moving; a sermon lasts for almost four pages. And then there's that sex scene, in which Martins describes himself, unerotically, as "one who had almost forgotten what it was like to cleave unto a woman". Pants become "delicate shackles", there is talk of "the most intimate flesh", and an "impudent tongue", and – bearing in mind that all this sex is taking place as the characters face an impossible horror – speculation that "a shrink might have suggested I was trying to hide myself inside her in some Oedipal way". Bring on the shortlists for the Bad Sex award: this must be a leading contender.

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Prince Philip bio explains the crankiness

No wonder he was cranky.

Spare a little sympathy for Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, famous for his irascibility and bizarre, occasionally offensive remarks in public. "If you stay here too long you will become slitty eyed," he was once heard to remark to a British student in China.

PHOTOS: Prince Philip: A royal life

Yikes. But as Philip Eade's new biography details, the little Greek princeling had a calamitous early life, filled with drama and multiple tragedies. He lost his home, his name and identity, his family and many of his close relatives by the time he was a teenager. Then his wife became Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 and he lost his job in the British navy, consigned from that point to play a supporting role, fathering her heirs, staying out of politics, organizing her palaces, and always walking a few paces behind her for the rest of his life.

This he has done, quite splendidly, but Eade shows what a frustrating struggle it has been for a smart, robust, take-charge alpha male to tamp down his natural instincts and personality. Philip has a temper, can't bear fools and says so. He's as likely to scoff at clucking about the terrible things that happened to his family.

'You are where you are in life so get on with it' is his philosophy," Eade quotes an old friend saying of him. "He never let misfortune cloud his life."

But what a lot of misfortune. It goes some way in explaining why Philip sometimes seemed wrong for the part of royal consort. Much of this is not news to Brits; Philip, who just turned 90, has been married to their queen for 64 years, making him the oldest and longest-serving consort of a British sovereign in history. But this is the first Philip biography to focus on his first 32 years, before his wife was crowned.

Americans, however, may be confused by the maddening entanglements of Philip's extended European family and his ethnic and royal connections. Eade does an admirable job explaining all this.

Philip, though born (in 1921 on Corfu) a prince of the now-exiled Greek royal family, is not Greek; he was mostly Danish (the Greeks recruited his grandfather, a Danish prince, to be their king in the 19th century), with German and English thrown in. Like his wife, he is a great-great-grandchild of Queen Victoria. He speaks no Greek, and though he was said to look "like a Greek god" when he was young, because he was so tall, blond and good-looking, in fact, he looked Danish. When he married Elizabeth in 1947, he renounced his Greek citizenship and Greek church and became British, Anglican and a royal duke.

When Philip was a baby, the Greeks got fed up with his family and ran them out of Greece. Subsequently, his mother, Alice, had a nervous breakdown and ended up in an asylum for years. His father drifted away to a mistress in Monaco, where he drank and gambled his way to an early death. His four older sisters married Germans, some who later became Nazis (which was awkward even though Philip fought on the Allied side in WWII). One sister and her entire family later died in a horrific plane crash.

Shuttled around to various relatives and boarding schools in Germany and Britain, Philip grew into a tough young man mostly raised by his English royal relations and marinated in the British navy. He adopted the name of his maternal uncle, the endlessly ambitious Lord Louis Mountbatten (the original German name, Battenberg, was changed during WWI), who helped him get cozy with his distant cousins, the British royal family. Princess Elizabeth, five years his junior, met him when she was 13 and promptly fell in love. He did not but he came round.

Now, four children, eight grandchildren, two great-grandchildren and thousands of public appearances later, Philip is as familiar a presence as the queen herself. If he is occasionally viewed with exasperation, he is also increasingly seen as crucial to her success. "He helped to make her what she's become," Eade quotes a diplomat saying. "We are extremely fortunate that he married her."

When the queen goes, the British no doubt will grieve deeply. This book suggests that when Philip goes, they may find themselves just as mournful.

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