'...Had what you might call a spiritual experience where I seen the poetic truth of ley lines. Looked at the veins in my wrist and seen the arteries of the countryside. Magic, that was.’
‘I thought it was acid.’
‘Well, aye, it was, but a vision’s a vision, ennit?' [loc. 3489]
Jumping from the first to the eleventh in a series means discovering that a lot has happened in the intervening nine books... Having read and enjoyed The Wine of Angels, first in the Merrily Watkins series, I found The Secrets of Pain in my well-populated Kindle TBR folder, and dived in.
Merrily, formerly the new vicar of Ledwardine on the Welsh Borders, is now a bona fide Deliverance Consultant for the Diocese of Hereford: that is, a professional exorcist. She encounters an old friend, SAS soldier turned chaplain Syd Spicer, who seems unsettled about something from his past. But hey, 'every SAS chaplain worth his kit knows thirty-seven ways to kill with a wooden cross': surely Syd can look after himself? Because there's plenty else on Merrily's plate: her daughter Jane's plans to sabotage a local landowner who's running shooting weekends at the Lodge; the savage murder of a local farmer; the deaths of two Romanian refugees in nearby Hereford; the reports of shadowy figures coming up from the river...
There are more perspectives in this novel than in The Wine of Angels, and plenty of plot that isn't directly related to Merrily and Ledwardine. The local police are attempting to find the murderer or murderers, and their complicated web of personal relationships might affect their investigations. There's still plenty of psychogeography, weirdness and the supernatural, from Alfred Watkins and his Old Straight Track to Julian of Norwich, from Mithraism to motor sports, with a diversion into exactly why the SAS have moved their headquarters to a site at the junction of two Roman roads, in the shadow of an Iron Age hillfort. Several delightful new characters join the 'starter set', in particular Miss White, currently resident in a care home (all the staff are scared of her) but with 'over fifty years’ experience of the techniques for personal growth circulating in the ruins of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Tragically, I shall have to read the rest of the series!
Interesting Phil Rickman interview, describing Merrily as "a decent woman trying to do a medieval job in a scornful world".
Read for Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 31 MAR 2018, prompt 'In the Same Series'.
No comments:
Post a Comment