The Cloister and the Heart

IN THIS HOUSE OF BREDE by Rumer Godden. 376 pages. Viking. $6.95.

Novels about nuns, even if the holy ladies drive Jeeps and play baseball, have a hard time making it. When the nuns are members of a contemplative order, the outlook is bleak indeed. Yet this chronicle of 15 years in an English monastery is an immensely readable book, partly because the way of life detailed here proves as exotic and medieval as Cosa Nostra society, partly because the story moves briskly forward, with only a few lapses into melodrama.

The story centers on the erratic spiritual progress of Dame Philippa, a widow who enters Brede at age 42 after a successful career as a British government officer. At least half a dozen more biographies are told with quiet humor and occasionally painful intimacy. Moreover, the order is beset by a fiscal crisis, which is solved when a scapular cross cracks open revealing a ruby as big as the Ritz. Miss Godden's stylistic triumph is the placing of events within the cycles of the divine office and the liturgical year. She lived at England's Stanbrook Benedictine monastery while writing the book, and has translated her observations of life there into a quiet celebration of reverence.

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