‘May I offer you a glass of sherry, Mr Cadmus? Or wine perhaps?’
‘We will drink our fill of golden sunshine. One of your national poets tells us this.’
‘I’m afraid I only have a Beaujolais from Tesco.' [p. 6]
Devon, 1981: two unmarried cousins, Maud Finch and Millicent Swallow, inhabit the end houses of a three-cottage terrace. The ladies are understandably alarmed when a Foreigner (easily identified by his yellow sportscar, green trousers and red sweater) moves into the middle house. However, the mysterious yet charming Mr Cadmus -- for it is he -- soon wins them over with chocolates, compliments and polite flirtation, and in turn the ladies introduce him to the social whirl of Lower Camborne. Unfortunately his arrival coincides with a string of alarming incidents, including an armed robbery at the Post Office, the abrupt departure of the vicar Anthony 'call me Tony' Beaumont, a murder or two ...
This short novel never quite gelled for me, perhaps because I was expecting something weirder. There were hints of the supernatural, and of an ambience suggestive of magic realism, but the actual story -- revenge for a crime committed during the war, tempered with a sharp satire on rural life in the early 1980s -- was depressingly mundane, and never quite resolved itself. A disappointment: I loved Ackroyd's early novels, and intend to reread them once they're available as ebooks (I have no idea why they haven't been published in this format), but this doesn't compare favourably.
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