An observer – of that dispassionate sort which novelists summon to their assistance when direct description begins to pall – would have attributed her vehemence, on this uncommonly hot day, to a pride in workmanship. But such an observer, like the majority of his spectral and deluded kind, would have been seriously mistaken. [p.172]
Oxford Don Gervase Fen, recently emerged from editing a definitive edition of Langland, is in need of a change: his solution to this is to stand for Parliament in the small town of Sanford Angelorum. Fen's energetic and idiosyncratic campaigning is punctuated by blackmail, murder, an escaped nudist lunatic who thinks he's Woodrow Wilson, and a domesticated poltergeist. I found the lunatic and the poltergeist more interesting than the crimes, the perpetrator of which became obvious to me around the same time as Fen worked it out, which was of course well before he mentioned it to anybody else.
The novel is set in rural England in summer 1947, there is little reference to the recent war. (Rationing? Land girls? Military installations? Scars on the landscape?) A cast of charming and eccentric folk -- Fen's election agent; a Cockney pub landlady and her non-doing pig; a comely female taxi-driver who owns her own car -- aid, abet and distract from Fen's investigations: there are quotidian tragedies and timeless comedies. And there is, hurrah!, plenty of mollocking, a term coined by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm (a previous Lockdown Book Club selection): Crispin, in conscious homage, also refers to one of his cast as 'a sullen-looking Cold-Comfort-Farmish sort of man'.
An entertaining read, but more for the little details and acerbic observations of rural life than for the murder mystery.
No comments:
Post a Comment