The late Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s autobiographical work The Seven Storey Mountain reads like a coming-of-age story, a theological reflection and sometimes like a novel sprinkled with wry humour, wit and tragedy. One of Merton’s contemporaries was British novelist Evelyn Waugh. We know that as a young man, Merton read and enjoyed Waugh’s novels. Like Waugh, Merton was a convert…