I first heard about this intriguing book on National Public Radio while driving home from the grocery store on a Saturday morning. Hearing Tony Hendra's voice immediately reminded me of scenes from what has to be the most excruciatingly merciless satire ever filmed, This Is Spinal Tap, a spoof on an early eighties rock group in which Hendra plays the band's manager with affected, serial aplomb. “When dealing with the topsy-turvy world of rock n' roll, having a good solid piece of wood in your hands comes in handy,” says Hendra as he punctuates his advice to his hapless musicians with a swinging a cricket bat.

Yet on the radio Hendra was talking about a Benedictine monk named Fr. Joseph Warrilow who helped him divert his life away from the kind of slow self-demolition that makes Spinal Tap such a painfully funny satire. Once home, I parked in my driveway and listened with nothing short of wonder to Hendra's clipped Hertfordshire accent as he spoke passionately about what the laws of improvisational comedy have in common with the lessons Father Joe had taught him about the nature of love. This either had to be a joke, or a very interesting book.

As it turns out, it's something of both. Hendra's career as a satirist includes his work as managing editor for National Lampoon in the 1970s, the off-Broadway, Lemmings, starring John Belushi and Chevy Chase, his nerve-wracking stint as co-creator of Spitting Image, the mid-eighties puppetry satire of every sacred cow in Britain and abroad, and of course, his role in the now cult-status Spinal Tap. He's a witty, intelligent, albeit partially knee-jerk liberal who seems to cultivate a hunger to puncture the pieties of every institution that comes within his formidable range.

This book will not disappoint those looking for similar satiric flourishes from Hendra's pen. He's quite a good writer. But the most interesting thing about Father Joe is how it sets in a personal narrative the origins of the anger and venomous energy behind much of Hendra's work. His story, it seems, is one of a frustrated monk discovering that he wasn't a monk in the first place, nor would he ever be. That discovery took twenty-five years to make, and left considerable personal wreckage in its wake.

It all started when fourteen year old Tony Hendra was seduced by the wife of the man who was teaching him about his Catholic faith. Because Tony attended a Protestant school, his neighbor volunteered to get him up to scratch with the catechism. Hendra's portrayal of this early traumatic episode is excellent (albeit disturbing too). Of course, the humorist Hendra is never far away. Here's his description of his first meeting with Ben and Lily Bootles: “The first few minutes were awkward: three woodland creatures toting around each other the customary baggage of English social inhibitions...testing out the possibilities of contact. It was like an early draft of The Wind in the Willows, before Grahame decided to focus on rodents.”

Fortunately, Lily only got the young Tony to second base. Unfortunately, at least at that moment, Ben discovered them flagrante delicto, and subsequently whisked the terrified boy off to the Isle of Wight, to Quarr Abbey, for penance and instruction at the hands of his Benedictine friends. Young Tony's imagination conjures up the worst tortures of the Inquisition as he waits in the monastic guesthouse for his ecclesiastical comeuppance. Hendra's story here has a Dickensian insight into the terrors of youth when confronted with the world of adult authority.

Enter Fr. Joseph Warrilow, the embodiment of everything opposed to the rule-obsessed version of Catholicism Tony had been taught since he could remember. Father Joe sported a “fleshy triangular nose” supporting “granny glasses that must have predated the Great War...the crowning glory: gigantic ears, wings of gristle, at right angles to the rather pointy close-shaven skull. The long rubbery lips were stretched in the goofiest of grins. Father Joseph Warrilow was as close to a cartoon as you could get without being in two dimensions.” Although Hendra shows a tendency to idolize people a bit too quickly, you get a sense that his portrait of Father Joe (“this lumpy gargoyle of a man”) is wonderfully true-to-life.

Father Joe's merciful reaction to his penitent's sins is life-changing in its simplicity and power. Hendra touches in this fine passage the heart of his book: “The verdict was gentle, final, the last word of, well, a father,” he writes, “A father unlike mine or anyone's I knew, unlike the men we were accustomed to call father or even—according to reports—the God we called Father.” A peace descends upon Hendra that night, only to haunt him with its fleeting taste for the next twenty-five years.

Hendra races through these frenetic years working with other equally incendiary comic writers. His account of his first doomed marriage, his courtship of drugs, casual sex, and his second rocky but ultimately successful marriage is extremely candid. (Hendra's candor in the book, however, has recently been severely challenged by allegations from Jessica Hendra, a daughter from his first marriage, that he sexually abused her when she was a child. He denies all charges.) Though no doubt an intelligent man—he won a scholarship to Cambridge—Hendra frequently falls prey to the simplifications often necessitated by comic invention. Hence Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are always forces of darkness, as is the “relentless intolerance” of the Vatican's stance on homosexuality. Hendra is even daffy enough to describe in the same sentence Pope John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev, calling them both “men of peace”.

Here lies the book's most significant weakness: for while being, in a sense, a story of Hendra's soul, it nevertheless leaves so much ground unexamined, so much unquestioned, so much buried under the certitudes of the left-leaning intelligentsia of the 1980's. Years later, while visiting Quarr, a saddened Hendra walks under a night sky and reflects about where his life has gone wrong. He tries to listen, as Father Joe always does so well. Somehow, he gets a sense that he can reconsider what he rejected long ago. “Rewind to zero and start again,” he thinks. Yet instead of digging deeper, examining more reflectively his moral and political principles, Hendra offers his reader a long-winded discourse on the Big Bang theory. I'd rather hear more about his sense of how Catholicism can become a normative guide for everyday living without the possibility of universal moral norms. Unfortunately, Hendra's editor nods now and again in this otherwise fine book.

A fine book, not a great one. Frank McCourt's cover blurb enjoins us to keep Father Joe on the shelf next to Saint Augustine, Saint Teresa of Avila, and Thomas Merton. More seriously, Andrew Sullivan's review in The New York Times virtually wishes Father Joe had been made Pope in order to replace the “cramped, fearful admonitions of today's Vatican”. Tony Hendra clearly would agree with Sullivan, for his sense of God's mercy—genuine as it seems to be—has little to do with moral truth outside of our own devising. But that's the main trouble with this often moving portrait of a spiritual father whose love could outlast the English hills: at the end, after so much gained and lost, Hendra never breaks out of the skepticism that his satirical wit has honed to such sharpness. His love for Father Joe is sincere, but also, I suspect, still largely unacquainted with the source that drove that kind floppy-eared man to live in an abbey for seventy years.