Published in 1989, this is an early novel by the ‘Wolf Hall’ author, and is refreshingly compact at under two hundred pages.
Set contemporaneously in and around a Roman Catholic church at Fetherhoughton, a small fictitious town in the north of England, it tells of events that start when the Bishop visits the incumbent, Father Angwin.
Father Angwin is, let’s say, traditional in his approach to faith. He knows his parishioners and how they like their religion – unchanging and uncomplicated. The Bishop thinks some modernisation would not go amiss, starting with the removal of the numerous statues that litter the church and represent long gone ideas of idolatry. He also promises to send a curate to help out in the ministry – someone young, keen and moving with the times.
Later that month, on a wet autumn evening, Fludd arrives at the presbytery. Father Angwin fears the worst, but Fludd’s influence on proceedings, and on the female coterie of the church and adjacent convent, is not so much threatening as unsettling. Events unwind, spiral even, and by the end (after the Fludd?) the community at Fetherhoughton is much changed.
The grim up north atmosphere is well done, and the characters are artfully drawn. The gentle humour is balanced by an underlying feeling of impending, wrath of God, doom. In the struggle of light against dark, which side is the Almighty on? And which side is Fludd on?
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