Frank Cottrell Boyce

Frank Cottrell Boyce: The Modern Catholic Spin on Things

I really wanted imaginary friends as a kid. The idea of having my own personal somebody seemed quite appealing. I tried to convince my mom once that I had an imaginary friend that looked like a duck. It was a bit of a failure because I couldn’t even convince myself that Ronny was right there—he’s right there, Mom. Sheesh. So imagine my wild envy of people, who had “real” imaginary friends or in the case of Millions’ protagonist, imaginary friends that were saints. So cool. Frank Cottrell Boyce, the British Catholic writer behind Millions, gives those invisible buddies a whole lot more depth and hilarity when he has St. Clare of Assisi crouched quite comfortably in a cardboard fort. Did I mention she’s also smoking a cigar? She’s a regular chimney. When our young hero looks at her skeptically, she glances to the sky and says, “You can do whatever you like up there.” St. Clare is not the only heavenly appearance, other saints pop up and give their opinions and support for the protagonist’s moral dilemmas throughout the novel. My favorite scene involves St. Joseph, but I won’t spoil the surprise.

If you consider yourself far too grown up for a child-directed, saint-infused escapade then you may want to skip Boyce’s novels and check out the movie/television screenplays that he has recently put together. In 2008, he wrote “God on Trial” for the BBC. It describes the radical story of Jewish Holocaust victims putting God on trial for murder. While the film makes some rather shattering denunciations of God, apparently it failed to shake Boyce’s beliefs. After he prepared and wrote the screenplay, he said, “How could [my faith] be vanquished by sitting in a room reading some books about it, when I was reading the words of people who had been through that and come out with their faith burning in them?”