(I come from an Episcopalian family, which is as close as Americans get, but we wandered off any vestige of High Churchiness very early in my life, and "as close as Americans get" is not actually that close.)
Mr. Pye is one of the other books by Mervyn Peake, famous in SFF circles for the massive, quirky, half-broken Gormenghast trilogy. (It's not really a trilogy. It's two big books that are basically what Peake wanted them to be, one short book written more-or-less while he was dying, and ideas for more that died with him, though his daughter Maeve Gilmore did expand a few of his notes into a fourth book.)
Unlike the Gormenghast books, Mr. Pye is set in our world. It is fantasy, of a type, but it doesn't look like fantasy for about the first half of the book. I'm afraid that any discussion of the book will "spoil" the fantasy element, so, if you are a purist about such things, stop reading now.
Mr. Pye was published in 1953. Looking at the list of Peake's works, I think it's his only other novel. So we can assume this story was important to him in some way. But it is quirky - even more so than the Gormenghast books, I think, though in a more traditional way.
Harold Pye is a small, round, middle-aged Englishman of unspecified background. As the novel opens, he's taking the boat from Guernsey to Sark, one of the smallest and most distant Channel Islands. He intends to settle in Sark and transform it: he is going to make its people good. Like so many reformers before and after him, he has an unassailable belief that he knows exactly what "good" is, and that he can mold an entire society into that shape.
More importantly, he's a compelling speaker. Even more importantly, Peake is firmly on his side, so when he talks vaguely about "the Great Pal" (his pet name for the Christian God, whom he claims to have long conversations with, though those conversations are not narrated in this book), none of his listeners scoff or laugh or raise any of the thousands of potential objections, many of which a reader will quickly call to mind and may even mutter under his breath while reading.
Instead, he first quickly enlists his landlady, Miss Dredger, who starts calling him "chief" as he calls her "sailor" and the two of them do call-and-response hymns and sea shanties to each other to show how matey they have become. Then, most of the people of the islands - Peake always divides them into natives and residents and visitors, and makes a big deal about the differences at the beginning of the novel in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with anything that happens in the novel - also come under his spell fairly quickly, all caught up in the thrill of the Great Pal.
The local prostitute, Tintagieu - this is the only name she gets; I'm not sure if it's a personal name or a surname or perhaps obscure identifier - for a while looks like she will be the center, or maybe the only resistance to Pye's domination, since she is willful and self-contained and not susceptible to his vague, bland statements. She might also not exactly be a prostitute: it's not clear if she regularly takes payment, but she does sleep with roughly the entire willing male population of the island on a regular basis and has no other obvious support.
Perhaps I should note here that Mr. Pye is not a tightly plotted book. It wanders about, as if it is ambling around the fields and cliffs of Sark on a sightseeing trip, and spends most of its time with Mr. Pye himself saying vague things about his faith and the concerns of his best buddy, the Great Pal.
Anyway, Tintagieu and the local painter, Thorpe (bad as a painter, stammering, not otherwise characterized) - they're seen as something like a couple in this book, despite Tintagieu's profession (or pastime?) - talk about Pye and his influence, and look like she will do something to counter it, for much of the first half of the book, but nothing comes of it.
Instead, the fantasy element emerges. This is your second chance to stop reading to avoid being spoiled; at this point you only have yourself to blame if you continue.
Mr. Pye starts to grow wings. White-feathered, clearly angelic wings, from his shoulder-blades. At about this time, he also notes that the Great Pal is not talking to him - whether this is "any more" or if he was mistaken or lying before is left as decision for the reader; I know which way I fall.
The wings are weird, and a proper Englishman - even one aiming to convert the entire population of a small island to his quirky version of Christianity, in preparation for possibly doing the same to larger and larger regions of the world - must never do anything weird. If any other English people saw the wings, they would at best shun him, maybe give him the whole Wicker Man treatment, or, even worse: point and laugh and scoff. So, obviously, Pye must start doing evil acts to balance his clear moral purity, which will make the wings shrink and disappear.
Since the author says so, this does work, and Pye kicks over children's sand-castles and secretly lets out all of the contents of the water-cisterns on the island and, oh yes, sneaks out at night to worship Satan in the form of a local goat. These actions might seem to some readers - this one, for example - to be of such radically different levels of "evil" that they don't make any sense as a list, but Pye does them all, and tracks, along with the aid of the redoubtable Dredger, the size of his wings after each evil action.
But, woe! The wings do disappear, but then he gets an itching sensation in his brow, and devil's horns appear there. So he must, at the climax of the book, balance good (telling people about the Great Pal) and evil (hanging out with that goat) to keep both manifestations in check. They see-saw back and forth, and this exhausts Pye, physically and morally and mentally.
Eventually, the locals - I think mostly natives, if that matters - see the horns, make the obvious conclusion, and assemble with pitchforks and Frankenstein rakes to find and capture the now-fleeing Pye. They also call in the constables from Guernsey, because that's what English people do: they might be a mob and a rabble, but by God! they're a mob and rabble that will hand over a miscreant to the proper authorities!
Tintagieu hides Pye in the local jail - the last place they'd look! - until night, when he tries to flee in a way that would never, ever work. And, on the last page of the book, the horse-drawn cart he's fleeing in wrecks, killing the horse and throwing the once again be-winged Pye into the air.
He flies away, of course. And the novel ends.
I think Peake meant this as some kind of commentary about living in the modern world, living up to your own principles, that kind of thing. I think Pye is meant to be heroic, in his way. I also do not believe a single thing Pye says for one second. I find his Great Pal talk silly and infantile, and the concepts of good and evil in this book so cartoonish as to be practically useless. You might have had to have been English and living in 1953, preferably on Sark, to get it.
It's a pleasant, goofy read, though, even if you can't take it seriously. And if you're looking for weird Christian fantasy, I don't know how much else you have after you've read Lewis and Williams.
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