Last updated on April 29th, 2026 at 05:42 pm
Are you grappling with the feeling that the faith of your upbringing no longer holds water in the harsh light of the real world? If you’ve ever stood in the ruins of what you once believed, wondering if anything sacred can survive, then Robert Keable’s forgotten masterpiece, Simon Called Peter, is the most important novel you’ve never read.
Simon Called Peter is bout a young, ambitious Anglican chaplain goes to the battlefields of World War I seeking to save souls, only to find that his religion is a hollow sham, and his true salvation lies not in a transcendent God, but in the passionate, human love of a free-spirited nurse who sees life more clearly than he ever could.
Simon Called Peter is best for readers who love morally complex spiritual journeys like The Power and the Glory or The End of the Affair; anyone fascinated by the disillusionment of the “Lost Generation”; and those who appreciate a rare, honest 1920s critique of institutional religion that remains astonishingly bold today.
Not for readers seeking a conventional war story with battlefield heroics; those looking for a tidy, redemptive ending; or anyone uncomfortable with an unflinching depiction of a clergyman’s total, unrepentant abandonment of his faith for what was, at the time, a scandalous extramarital affair.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Simon Called Peter, a novel by Robert Keable, was published in 1921. It stands as a seminal, if controversial, piece of post-World War I literature.
The book tells the story of Peter Graham, a gifted and popular young Church of England curate who serves as a chaplain in France during the Great War.
Away from the smug respectability of his London congregation, Peter confronts the brutal reality of life behind the lines, where his conventional, platitudinous faith crumbles in the face of human need, sensuality, and intellectual honesty.
His spiritual and moral compass is utterly shattered, only to be recalibrated around an all-consuming passion for Julie Gamelyn, a colonial nurse who embodies a secular, life-affirming paganism that is both his damnation and his salvation.
2. Background
Simon Called Peter is a direct product of the disillusionment that followed the First World War. The conflict, which was supposed to be the “war to end all wars,” had instead shattered the old social, political, and religious order.
A generation was left spiritually adrift, and Keable gives voice to this “Lost Generation.” In his preface, Keable writes, “The glamour of no other evil thing is stronger than the glamour of war… A new generation has always been found to talk of the heroisms… and to forget that so great a miracle does not justify our creation of the circumstance.”
He explicitly states his purpose: to lift the veil on “life behind the lines in time of war,” a reality the “stay-at-homes will not believe,” particularly those whose “smug respectability and conventional religion has been put to no such fiery trial.” This is the raw, immediate context for Peter’s journey.
3. Simon Called Peter Summary
Part I: The Collapse of a Conventional Faith
The story opens on a Sunday morning in London just before the war’s outbreak.
Peter Graham is a “perfectly dressed young man, in a frock coat and silk hat of the London clergyman,” on his way to preach a prestigious sermon at St. John’s, a church of “mid-Victorian faith and manners.”
He is an ambitious young man with a tacit understanding with Hilda Lessing, the daughter of a wealthy, stolid churchwarden.
The city is buzzing with the imminent threat of war, but Hilda’s father, Mr. Lessing, dismisses it as a business impossibility: “The credit system makes it impossible.”
Peter, however, is deeply agitated and preaches a fiery, emotional sermon warning of a coming apocalypse, taking the text “Jesus had compassion on the multitude.” He powerfully contrasts God’s divine compassion with the impending slaughter.
The congregation is stunned, but for Peter, it’s a moment of premonition rather than conviction. Soon after, he applies for a chaplaincy, partly out of genuine duty and partly, as he admits to Hilda, because “it is a chance of a lifetime to get into touch with the men.”
On the train to France, Peter, a self-conscious “fresher” in his new uniform, is taken in by a group of world-weary officers: the roguish South African, Captain Donovan; the blunt Major Bevan; and the pleasure-seeking Jenks.
They accept him not as a spiritual guide, but simply as a good fellow.
This is Peter’s first taste of a world where his clerical collar commands no inherent respect, a feeling that is “like sinking back in an easy-chair.” He arrives in France and is assigned to a rest camp in Rouen.
His initial efforts at ministry are a complete failure.
A celebration of Holy Communion is attended by a hungover Officer Commanding and one sheepish private. A parade service in the forest falls flat; the men are stiff and unresponsive. A Wesleyan corporal tells him what he already fears: “It don’t grip, sir.”
Peter is plagued by the sense that he is a vendor of an unwanted product.
He confesses in a letter to Hilda, “I’m like a salesman with a shop full of goods that nobody wants because they don’t fulfil the advertisement.”
The emptiness of his message is driven home during a conversation with a thoughtful officer named Langton, who tells him, unsparingly, “I can’t really trust in a dead man, or a man on the right hand of the throne of God. What Tommy wants is a pal to lean on in the canteen and the street… Be honest, padre—the thing is a spectre of the imagination.”
The war’s reality, with its easy camaraderie, its drinking, and its casual sex, makes Peter’s old certainties seem like a ghost story.
Peter is transferred to Le Havre.
A chance encounter at a concert puts him face-to-face with Julie Gamelyn. She calls him over with roguish, laughing eyes, having wagered with her friend Tommy that she could make him come. She is his complete antithesis: a colonial South African nurse who is spontaneous, provocative, and utterly unafraid of life.
As they begin a lopsided flirtation, she shares her starkly cynical, worldly philosophy: “It’s an animal passion for the purpose of populating the earth. And if you ask me, I think it is rather a dirty trick on the part of God.”
Peter’s moral and spiritual disorientation accelerates.
He befriends a French prostitute named Louise, with whom he forms a platonic but deeply intimate bond. On a day trip to Caudebec with Julie, he is driven mad by her flirtatiousness and her unapologetic vitality.
He bursts out, “You darling! I believe I’d rather have you than—than God!” It is a declaration he cannot take back.
The crisis culminates during an air raid on a troop train, where the hedonistic Jenks, a man who lived for the moment, is fatally wounded. As Jenks lies dying, Peter can offer him nothing. “Jenks, old man… Think about God—you are going to Him, you know.
Trust Him, will you?” he pleads.
Jenks’s final, faint request is a devastating indictment of Peter’s spiritual bankruptcy: “Don’t you worry, padre… Reckon I won’t—shirk. Have you—got—a cigarette?” Peter lights it for him as he dies, realising he has nothing his old faith can offer.
Part II: The Crucible of Love
Sent to Abbeville, Peter has a fleeting reconciliation with Hilda, but the break is final. Hilda represents the old, respectable world he can no longer inhabit. In a letter, she begs him not to go among “publicans and sinners.”
But Peter has moved beyond her reach. His intellectual and spiritual journey is now fully entwined with his passion for Julie.
In Le Havre, his relationship with Julie deepens, but she remains an enigma. She is capable of both flippant cruelty and profound tenderness. One night, after a tense dinner with Langton, she confronts Peter, demanding to know why he is upset.
She astutely reads him perfectly: “I was quite proper to-night, immensely and intensely proper, and you didn’t like it. You had never seen me so.”
He admits his jealousy, and she provokes him with a wild, half-serious toast: “Here’s to the day when your big boots and my little shoes lie outside the same closed door!”
This passion reaches its apotheosis on a joint leave in London. Peter, having severed all psychological ties to his former life, books a suite at a grand hotel for them as “Mr. and Mrs. Graham.”
The days they spend together are a fever dream of theatre visits, intimate dinners in Soho, and nights of passionate, unbridled physical love.
For Julie, these days are the giving of a sacred gift. Peter, still caught in his intellectual quest, describes a sublime vision of God’s love he experiences during an early morning visit to Westminster Cathedral, telling her, “I’ve seen Love, Julie.”
His epiphany is that God’s love is a massive, passive, waiting force, unlike their burning, consuming passion.
But Julie, who has known all along what he has only just begun to grasp, sees the truth with unflinching clarity. She realises that Peter’s love for her, however deep, is not the ultimate reality for him that he is for her. She sees he is built for the divine in a way she can never be.
As their leave draws to a close, Peter presses her, desperately, to marry him. He cries, “I want to put you right in the very centre of everything, and live for you, Julie.”
Her final refusal is the novel’s devastating climax.
She explains, with an honesty that is both brutal and heroic, that he cannot put her in the centre, for that place is already taken by the God he is trying to flee. She will not accept a secondary place, worshipping him while he worships another. “I love you so, Peter, that I won’t marry you,” she says. “You would give up God for me, Peter, but you can’t, or if you did, you’d lose us both. But I, Peter—oh, my darling, I have no god but you. And that’s why I’ll worship you, Peter, and sacrifice to you, Peter, sacrifice to your only ultimate happiness… and sacrifice my all.”
The ending is not a neat return to the fold. It is a chastening, a breaking, and a beginning.
Julie, the “Magdalene” who had been “forgiven in a word,” gives Peter back to the God he almost lost. Her last act is to sit by the fire in their hotel room and burn the memento of their love—the withered primroses, the menu card, the cracker cap—sacrificing her own heart so that his might be free.
The novel famously closes with a blank last page, the curtain falling not on a conclusion, but “at a psychological moment in their story,” leaving Peter—and the reader—looking into a future governed by a newly understood, fearsome, and patient love.
4. Simon Called Peter Analysis
4.1. Simon Called Peter Characters
Peter Graham: The novel’s protagonist is a profoundly complex character study.
He begins as a rather priggish, ambitious, and theologically shallow cleric. His development is not a simple arc of growth but a complete deconstruction and a hesitant, painful rebuilding.
His greatest strength is his intellectual and emotional honesty; he cannot abide the “prettinesses” of his former life.
His central flaw is a kind of spiritual blindness.
He spends much of the novel mistaking his passion for Julie—a real, burning, human thing—as being in opposition to divine love, rather than a vector through which it might finally reach him. His final, tearful surrender is not a victory but a submission to a force larger than his own will.
Julie Gamelyn: Julie is the novel’s magnificent, tragic soul. She appears at first to be a stereotypical “flapper”—shallow, provocative, and morally careless. Keable, however, masterfully reveals the hidden depths behind her “roguish” eyes. Her world-weary philosophy (“Be a good pal, and don’t worry”) is a shield for a past pain she only hints at.
She is, as she tells him, “French in the heart,” understanding love as an absolute, total gift.
Her final sacrifice is a monumental act of moral courage. She sees Peter’s destiny more clearly than he does and, in what she believes is her own Godless state, performs a saintly act by shattering their shared dream so that he might find his true self. S
he is one of the most memorable and fully realized heroines in early 20th-century literature.
Hilda Lessing: Hilda exists as a perfect foil to Julie, representing everything Peter is leaving behind. She is a product of the “smug respectability” Keable despises.
Her religion is not a living faith but “the secret of social order.” Her tragedy is that she genuinely loves Peter but cannot even begin to comprehend the wilderness he has entered. Her letter to him, pleading for him to be “sensible,” is a masterclass in well-intentioned spiritual blindness.
Louise: The French prostitute, Louise, is a pivotal but often overlooked character.
She serves as a living theological argument. She embodies the paradox of profound faith within a life of profound sin.
Her simple, unwavering belief that the Host at Mass is truly “le bon Jesu” shames Peter’s intellectual cynicism. Her final act of service—refusing his sexual advances because “you are my friend, I cannot sell myself to you”—shows a moral integrity Peter himself lacks at that moment.
She is the means by which he begins to see that compassion is larger than condemnation.
4.2. Simon Called Peter Themes and Symbolism
The Failure of Institutional Religion: Keable’s primary target is the hollow, backboneless, and socially-complicit Church of England.
This is personified in characters like Mr. Lessing, whose faith is entirely subservient to business and class stability, and the senior curate who performs rituals without meaning. Keable argues that this version of Christianity is nothing more than a fraudulent exchange, offering a domesticated, comfortable God instead of the terrifying, passionate reality.
Love as the Only True Sacrament: The novel systematically sets up a hierarchy of loves. At the bottom is the lustful exchange in the brothel, a transaction devoid of meaning.
Higher is the complex camaraderie of men at war. Higher still is Peter and Hilda’s “understanding,” a respectable arrangement with no deep soul-connection. The highest purely human love is between Peter and Julie—a consuming fire of body, mind, and spirit.
But transcending even this is the divine, agape love that Peter glimpses in the cathedral, a love that “waits,” “gives,” and “suffices all.” The climax hinges on Julie’s Christ-like sacrifice, where her human love for Peter perfectly mirrors and makes possible his reception of divine love.
The Multitude: The text and title, Simon Called Peter, constantly return to the idea of “the multitude”—the ordinary soldiers, the nurses, the street-girls, the “publicans and sinners.”
Peter’s journey is about leaving the self-righteous ninety-nine in the “wilderness” of respectable London and finding the divine presence in the midst of the lost multitude.
The final vision of the novel is not Peter as a successful preacher, but as a broken man who has finally learned to see the face of Christ in the people he once judged.
5. Evaluation
Simon Called Peter is an extraordinary and audacious novel. It feels like a literary depth charge launched against the armored hull of the 1920s Anglican establishment.
Strengths: The book’s greatest strength is its brutal emotional and spiritual honesty.
This is not a polite, allegorical journey; it’s a raw, stomach-churning crisis of faith, and Keable refuses to provide easy answers. The characterization of Julie is a stunning achievement—she lives and breathes off the page with a vitality that easily eclipses Hilda’s cardboard respectability.
The prose shifts expertly from the jaunty, slangy dialogue of the officers’ mess to passages of profound and lyrical beauty, such as Peter’s vision in Westminster Cathedral.
Weaknesses: The novel can feel episodic, structured around debates and set-piece scenes rather than a tightly woven plot. Peter’s intellectual agonizing occasionally becomes repetitive.
To a modern reader, some of the colonial and gender attitudes can feel dated, though Julie’s agency remains remarkably fresh.
The theological conclusions, which were deeply subversive in 1921, might now seem more like a profound personal journey than a systematic solution, which is arguably the point.
Impact: The book left me feeling emotionally hollowed out and strangely exhilarated. It is a poignant reminder that the spiritual path is often one of breaking, not building.
Julie’s final sacrifice is one of the most haunting and beautiful endings in modern literature. It is a book that makes most contemporary “religious” fiction feel timid by comparison.
Comparison with Similar Works: The most obvious comparator is Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, which explores a similar love triangle involving a writer, his married lover, and a God who will not be ignored. It also anticipates the spiritual angst of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
In its raw depiction of the wartime “experience,” it sits alongside Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, though from a uniquely clerical perspective.
6. Personal Insight with Contemporary Educational Relevance
The most challenging and contemporarily relevant angle of Simon Called Peter is its prophetic critique of what we now habitually call “performative” or “cultural” Christianity.
A century before the phrases “religious nones” and “deconstruction” entered the mainstream, Keable dissected the soul of a man whose faith was entirely performative and cultural.
The book chillingly illustrates the spiritual anemia of a faith that is simply a vector for social climbing and respectability.
The church St. John’s, with its focus on wealth and status, produces Peter Graham, a man who can preach eloquently but has never truly encountered the God he speaks of. When the thin veneer of his social world is ripped away by the raw, existential pressure of the war—and by the raw, honest sensuality of a woman like Julie—his faith collapses instantly because it had no real substance.
According to recent research from the Pew Research Center, the rise of “nones”—people who identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular”—has been one of the most dramatic religious changes in the West over the last few decades, with a significant percentage leaving religion not because they find its intellectual claims wanting, but because they see it as hypocritical and socially toxic. Peter Graham is their literary ancestor.
His story is a powerful educational tool for exploring how a faith rooted in social conformity rather than transformative inner experience is a faith destined for the ash heap.
Keable, a priest himself, held up a terrifying mirror to his own Church, and we are still, tragically, looking at its reflection.
7. Simon Called Peter Quotes
On the hypocrisy of the stay-at-homes: “The stay-at-homes will not believe, and particularly they whose smug respectability and conventional religion has been put to no such fiery trial. Moreover they will do more than disbelieve; they will say that the story is not fit to be told. Nor is it. But then it should never have been lived.” (Author’s Preface)
On the failure of his faith: “I’m like a salesman with a shop full of goods that nobody wants because they don’t fulfil the advertisement. And I never felt more utterly alone in my life.” (Peter’s letter to Hilda)
Julie’s cynical, worldly philosophy: “Be a good pal, and don’t worry.” (Julie to Peter)
Peter’s first, damning confession of idolatry: “I believe I’d rather have you than—than God!” (Peter to Julie at Caudebec)
The faith of the prostitute: “Oui, oui,” protested Louise vehemently, “It is. It is le bon Jesu. It is He who is there. He passed by us among them all, as we read He went through the crowds of Jerusalem in the holy Gospel.” (Louise to Peter)
A dying man’s final communion: “Don’t you worry, padre… Reckon I won’t—shirk. Have you—got—a cigarette?” (Jenks’s last words)
Peter’s vision of divine love: “It’s far bigger than you or I, Julie. Our love is like a candle held up to the sun beside it. Our love wants something, doesn’t it? It burns, it—it intoxicates, Julie. But this love waits, waits, do you understand? It asks nothing; it gives, it suffices all. Year after year it just waits, Julie, waits for anyone, waits for everyone. And you can spurn it, spit on it, crucify it, and it is still there when you—need, Julie.” (Peter to Julie)
Julie’s magnificent, devastating sacrifice: “I love you so, Peter, that I won’t marry you… You would give up God for me, Peter, but you can’t, or if you did, you’d lose us both. But I, Peter—oh, my darling, I have no god but you. And that’s why I’ll worship you, Peter, and sacrifice to you, Peter, sacrifice to your only ultimate happiness, Peter, and sacrifice my all.” (Julie to Peter)
8. Conclusion
Simon Called Peter is a flawed, fervent, and unforgettable masterpiece of spiritual catastrophe.
It is not simply a “war novel” but a profound and moving exploration of a soul caught between the sacred and the profane, finding redemption not in a triumphant return to orthodoxy, but in a state of utterly broken, humbled love.
I would recommend this book unhesitatingly to anyone who has ever been cut by the jagged edges of life and found their childhood faith insufficient to bind the wound. Fans of literary fiction that grapples unflinchingly with theology, such as the work of Graham Greene or Fyodor Dostoevsky, will find it a lost classic.
Its final, blank page is not an ending, but a terrifying, hopeful beginning, which is, perhaps, the most honest spiritual statement a book can make.
