Conclave: The Book Behind the Oscar-Winning Film

Edward Berger’s Conclave won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2025 ceremony — a rare honour for a thriller, and a reminder that the genre, when executed at the highest level, is as serious a vehicle for ideas as any prestige drama. The film stars Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence, a man of quiet, eroding faith who is appointed to oversee the election of a new Pope following the death of the incumbent. Over the course of a few claustrophobic days in the Vatican, he must manage the competing ambitions of four cardinal candidates, a College of Cardinals riven by factionalism, and his own private doubts about whether any of it — the Church, the papacy, his vocation — amounts to what he once believed it did.

It is an excellent film. It is also an adaptation of a novel that is, in several important respects, better than the film it produced.

The Original Novel

Conclave by Robert Harris was published in 2016 and has the clean, driven architecture of a book that knows exactly what it is and refuses to waste a sentence. Harris is not a novelist who makes you wait. Within a dozen pages, the old Pope is dead, the cardinals are assembling, and the machinery of secrecy that surrounds a conclave — the sealed Sistine Chapel, the sworn oaths, the smoke signals — is in motion. The novel runs to roughly 300 pages. It does not feel like 300 pages.

Harris’s central intelligence is Cardinal Lawrence, the Dean of the College of Cardinals, a man who privately suspects he has lost his faith and who finds that suspicion tested not by theology but by what he observes in the men around him. The four candidates — a conservative African cardinal, a liberal Italian, a doctrinaire Spaniard, and a mysterious figure elevated in secret by the late Pope — are each rendered with economical sharpness. We understand their politics, their vanities, their vulnerabilities, and their genuine convictions, often in the space of a single scene.

What Harris does that the film cannot fully replicate is give us direct access to Lawrence’s interior voice — the specific texture of a man’s disillusionment, his flickers of hope, his careful management of what he knows against what he is permitted to act on. Fiennes’s performance is remarkable, but performance is inference; prose is statement. The novel tells you what Lawrence thinks. The film asks you to read it in a face. Both are valid. They are not the same experience, and the novel’s version is more precise.

The procedural dimension is also richer on the page. Harris researched the mechanics of a real conclave in close detail — the balloting system, the accommodation of cardinals in the Casa Santa Marta, the protocols around the white and black smoke — and integrates that research seamlessly into the narrative. Reading the novel, you understand how a conclave actually functions, which makes its dramatic possibilities feel earned rather than invented. The film gestures at this, but compression necessarily elides some of it.

The Ending

Conclave ends with a twist. We will not explain it in full — the experience of reaching it without foreknowledge is part of what the novel offers — but it is worth preparing readers for what they will encounter.

The twist is not a solution to a murder mystery in the classic sense, though Conclave has the structure and atmosphere of a thriller, and Harris seeds clues throughout. It is instead a revelation about a character’s identity that reframes the novel’s central questions about faith, authority, and what the Church is prepared to accept. It arrives in the final pages, after the election has been decided, and it hits with considerable force.

Whether it works is the subject of genuine disagreement among readers. The case for it: the twist is fair — the information required to anticipate it is present in the text, if you read carefully — and it does something thematically coherent with everything Harris has been building. The conclave, with all its secrecy and procedural gravity, produces an outcome that the Church’s own structures could never have endorsed openly. There is a pointed irony in that. Harris is not simply deploying a shock ending for its own sake.

The case against it: the final revelation introduces a category of information that sits uneasily with the realism the novel has otherwise maintained, and some readers feel it tips the book from political thriller into something more sensational than the preceding 280 pages have prepared them for. The film, directed by Berger, keeps the twist but frames it somewhat differently — softening some of its implications while sharpening others.

Our view: the ending works. It is divisive because it asks the reader to extend the novel’s logic one step further than feels comfortable, which is precisely what good twist endings do. If you find yourself resistant to it on first reading, it is worth sitting with the question of why — what assumption the twist has unsettled — because Harris is asking that question deliberately.

Robert Harris as a Thriller Writer

Robert Harris is one of the most consistently accomplished thriller writers working in English. His career is built on a specific approach: take a historical or institutional setting that most readers know only in outline, research it in serious depth, and then construct a thriller that depends on that depth for its tension. His novels are not thrillers that happen to have historical settings; they are novels about how institutions and historical forces actually work, with thriller mechanics used to make that analysis propulsive.

Fatherland (1992), his debut, remains one of the great counterfactual novels: Germany won the Second World War, and a Berlin police detective in 1964 stumbles onto a conspiracy to conceal what happened to the Jews of Europe. It is a murder mystery, a Cold War thriller, and a study of how totalitarian systems produce and sustain denial, all at once.

Enigma (1995) is set at Bletchley Park in 1943, following a codebreaker whose former colleague has disappeared in circumstances that point towards a Soviet mole. Harris uses the actual mechanics of Enigma decryption — the bombes, the crib-based attacks on messages — to generate genuine intellectual suspense. The historical texture is dense and accurate.

The Cicero trilogy — Imperium (2006), Lustrum (2009), and Dictator (2015) — is his most ambitious work and arguably his best. The three novels cover the complete career of Cicero, the Roman orator and statesman, narrated by his slave and secretary Tiro (who actually existed, and who actually invented a form of shorthand to record Cicero’s speeches). Harris uses Rome’s collapsing republic — the rise of Caesar, the breakdown of democratic norms, the murder of Cicero on the orders of Mark Antony — as a vehicle for thinking about how democracies fail. The trilogy is alert, erudite, and surprisingly funny. If you read it after Conclave, you will notice that Harris’s interest in institutional politics, in men who serve power and are then consumed by it, runs across his entire career.

Pompeii (2003) is a tighter, more self-contained novel about the days leading up to the eruption of Vesuvius, seen through the eyes of a young water engineer. Act of Oblivion (2022) follows two regicides — the men who signed Charles I’s death warrant — as they flee to the American colonies after the Restoration, pursued by a relentless agent of the Crown. It is less well-known than it deserves to be.

Conclave sits comfortably in the centre of this body of work: not his most ambitious novel, but among his most perfectly constructed. It is the book to give someone who has never read Harris and wants to understand what he does.

What to Read After Conclave

If Conclave — either the film or the novel — has opened a door, here is where to go next.

Robert Harris is the obvious first move. Fatherland is the place to start for new readers: it is his most fully realised single novel, and it demonstrates everything about his method — the institutional research, the propulsive plot, the moral weight — at its sharpest. If you prefer something more explicitly political, Imperium (the first volume of the Cicero trilogy) is the more rewarding choice, though it rewards patience in its early chapters as Harris establishes Rome’s legal and political landscape.

If what drew you to Conclave was the atmosphere — the enclosed world, the procedural detail, the sense of a hidden institution operating by rules most outsiders never see — then the territory of John le Carré is the natural next destination. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the obvious recommendation: a novel about a retired intelligence officer called back to identify a mole at the top of British intelligence, constructed with the same precision and the same interest in institutional loyalty and betrayal that Harris brings to the Vatican.

If the thriller mechanics mattered most to you — the ticking-clock structure, the twist — then Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is the best contemporary example of a mainstream thriller that takes its twist as seriously as Harris takes his. Both novels depend on the reader accepting certain premises about the narrator, and both reward a reread once the ending is known.

Conclave is, finally, a novel about faith: what survives of it when you have seen behind every curtain, and whether that residue is enough. For readers who found that dimension most compelling, The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene — the story of a whisky priest fleeing persecution in Mexico — is the deeper exploration of the same territory. Greene was doing for Catholicism what Harris does for the Vatican bureaucracy: stripping the institution away to find out what, if anything, remains.

Affiliate disclosure: Links on this site are affiliate links. We earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This does not influence our editorial recommendations.