Conclave

A Thriller Built on Ceremony

Robert Harris has spent his career finding thrillers inside institutions — the codebreaking rooms of Bletchley Park, the corridors of the Roman Senate, the back offices of Downing Street. Conclave, published in 2016, is perhaps his most elegant exercise in the form. The setting is the Sistine Chapel. The procedure is the election of a new Pope. The question Harris asks is the one he always asks: what do people do with power when no one is watching, and what does an institution become when it closes its doors?

The novel begins with the death of a Pope — sudden, unexplained, troubling. Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, must organise and preside over the conclave that follows: a sequestered gathering of the most powerful men in the Catholic Church, locked inside the Vatican until they have elected a successor. Harris renders the ritual with meticulous care — the burning of ballots, the black and white smoke, the precise choreography of an election that has not changed in its essentials for centuries — and uses it as the architecture for a plot of gathering menace. Secrets emerge. A candidate’s past is not what it seemed. An impossible secret sits at the novel’s centre, withheld until the final pages.

Faith, Doubt, and Cardinal Lomeli

What elevates Conclave above a straightforward procedural is its central character. Lomeli is not a villain or a schemer. He is a man of genuine faith who is not sure he still believes, tasked with overseeing an election he finds both sacred and grotesque. Harris gives him an interiority that is rare in the thriller genre — a quiet, intelligent melancholy about the distance between the Church’s ideals and its practice, between the grace the institution promises and the ambition it rewards.

This is Harris writing at his most controlled. There is no wasted movement, no scene that does not advance both plot and character simultaneously. The cardinals who gather — the ambitious African reformer, the rigid traditionalist, the smooth Italian, the mysterious late arrival — are sketched economically but precisely, each representing a different answer to the question of what the Church is for and who it should be. The novel is too short to fully inhabit all of them, and some feel more like positions than people, but Harris’s instinct for compression keeps the narrative from collapsing under its own weight.

The 2024 Film

Edward Berger’s film adaptation, released in 2024 and starring Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lomeli, won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay — a recognition that the source material was doing something worth adapting. Fiennes brings a characteristic stillness and moral weight to the role that Harris’s novel invites. The film is visually sumptuous, procedurally faithful, and intelligent about the same themes. It is worth watching.

The novel, however, came first and gives you more: more time with Lomeli’s doubt, more texture in the secondary characters, and the full impact of the ending unmediated by performance and cinematography. Readers who saw the film and found themselves gripped by the world Harris invented will find the book rewards the attention the film may not quite have had time for. And readers who come to the novel first will find that the film is one of the more respectful and capable translations of Harris’s work to screen.

Why It Works

At its core, Conclave is a novel about what institutions do to the people inside them and what those people do to their institutions. The Catholic Church, in Harris’s telling, is neither a corrupt caricature nor a naive ideal — it is a human organisation, ancient and formidable, shaped by the same ambitions and vanities that shape all human organisations, and containing the same proportion of the saintly and the self-serving. Lomeli loves it and cannot quite trust it. The reader ends up in the same position.

The final twist is audacious — genuinely shocking in a way that few thrillers manage — and Harris plants the clues fairly enough that on reflection it does not feel like a cheat. Whether it satisfies or unsettles will depend on the reader, and that ambiguity is part of the point. Conclave is not interested in easy reassurances about faith or institutions. It is interested in the gap between what we ask our institutions to be and what they are capable of becoming.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Gripping, elegant, and tightly plotted. Harris at his most controlled, with a setting rich enough to carry the weight he puts on it and an ending that will stay with you.