Church Cat-and-Mouse : ABSOLUTE TRUTHS, <i> By Susan Howatch (Alfred A. Knopf: $25; 559 pp.)</i>

If anyone had told me seven years ago that I would devour six 500-plus-page novels about the Church of England in the 20th Century, I would have told them they were out of their mind. I can’t imagine a subject about which I have less natural curiosity, but I’ve been a fan of Susan Howatch since college, when I picked up her gothic thriller “Penmarric” and whiled away a dateless homecoming weekend.

Howatch is an amazingly engaging writer who can’t resist the urge to flaunt her intelligence. “Penmarric,” ostensibly a juicy, historical bodice-ripper about a rich Cornish family at the turn of the century, is based on the tale of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, a fact I never would have grasped if the author hadn’t continually elbowed the reader with quotes from “The Oxford History of England: From Domesday Book to Magna Carta.”

The six novels in her Church of England series--”Glittering Images,” “Glamorous Powers,” “Ultimate Prize,” “Scandalous Risks,” “Mystical Paths” and the latest addition, “Absolute Truths”--are mesmerizing psychological mysteries with a mystical twist, set in the fictional English cathedral town of Starbridge. In actuality, this is Salisbury, the same English cathedral town that Anthony Trollope immortalized in his six-volume Church of England series, “Chronicles of Barchester.”

Religion is to Starbridge what cars are to Detroit. It seems as if everyone who lives in Starbridge is a canon, dean, abbot or archdeacon--or is married to one (God help these people if the plumbing fails). I still couldn’t tell you the difference between these clerical titles, the author never bothers to explain, but whatever their rank, the clergyman is sure to have a deep, dark secret, raging hormones (Anglican priests are emphatically not required to be celibate), a dysfunctional family and a weakness for drink. Not surprisingly, midway through each book comes a spiritual catastrophe that can only be resolved by a visit to the Hercule Poirot of the ecclesiastic set, Jonathan Darrow, a psychic ex-monk who once raised a cat from the dead and predicted all the major battles of World War II.

Though the formula grows a bit predictable by Volume Four, the troubled clergymen have singular problems and fascinating eccentricities. They all make a point of refusing to smoke when they’re wearing their clerical collars and have a peculiar idea of what constitutes good postcoital conversation. For instance, Charles Ashworth, Bishop of Starbridge, recalls an erotic interlude with his spectacularly efficient, sex-obsessed wife, Lyle: “ ‘St. Paul should have had sex regularly,’ said Lyle as we lit our cigarettes.” (Lyle has plenty of practice with these conversations as she has slept with two bishops and almost succumbed to Neville Aysgarth, the Dean of Starbridge, who also happens to be her husband’s enemy.)

‘Absolute Truths,” the finale, is set in 1965 and is narrated by Ashworth, the intellectual hero of “Glittering Images,” the first and best book. (This should be read first, or you’ll be frustrated by the many coy references to cataclysmic events followed by “I think it quite unnecessary for me to recount this florid tale.”) Ashworth, “old as the century,” is now bishop of Starbridge, the father of two sons and has been happily married to the Lyle, “the perfect wife for a bishop,” for 27 years.

“I was like an expensive car tended to by a devoted mechanic,” Ashworth recalls. “Fit busy, respected, pampered, and privileged.” Howatch fans will immediately realize he’s on the verge of a total breakdown. Tragedy comes when Lyle dies suddenly and the grief-stricken Bishop’s perfect world shatters. He’s forced to come to terms with his failings as a husband and a father, to maintain his faith and discipline in the midst of the less-than-Christian-1960s, to stop the scheming Aysgarth from selling off a rare church manuscript--and to fend off a bevy of horny but devout women who all want to be the next Mrs. Bishop.

Fortunately, the clairvoyant trouble-shooter Darrow is on the job, though he’s living in the woods, following God’s latest call to be a hermit. (Would you trust this man to solve your problems? I think not.) Aysgarth, Ashworth and Darrow are supposed to represent the different philosophical factions of the Church of England, a literary conceit I would have missed if the penetrating Darrow hadn’t spelled it out for me: “Here we are, all sitting around a table,” he says, “the Protestant from the Low Church wing, the priest from the Middle Way, and the Anglo-Catholic. . . . We clash, inter-lock, interweave, move apart--then clash all over again in an unceasing engagement, which produces the Church.”

The author’s high-mindedness does get a little annoying. Each character has a patron philosopher--in Ashworth’s case, Austin Farrer, the warden of Keble College in Oxford, whom he paraphrases constantly. In the early volumes, Howatch threw in just enough theology to make you think; now, however, she falls back on longer religious riffs whenever she runs out of plot. Still, the author has created a world that I am genuinely sad to leave. I wonder what she’ll write next? Eight volumes on orchard cultivation?