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A review by hayesstw
All of a Winter's Night by Phil Rickman
4.0
I suppose one could sum it up by saying this this book is to morris dancing what [b:The nine tailors|126675|The Nine Tailors (Lord Peter Wimsey, #11)|Dorothy L. Sayers|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1353285546s/126675.jpg|2795358] by [a:Dorothy Sayers|8734|Dorothy L. Sayers|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1519840173p2/8734.jpg] is to church bell ringing.
I looked at this book very carefully before buying it, to make sure that it was not [b:Midwinter of the spirit|317372|Midwinter of the Spirit (Merrily Watkins, #2)|Phil Rickman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1391314794s/317372.jpg|1779108] sneakily published under a different title, since they have republished old Phil Rickman books under new titles before, as a trap for the unwary.
It turned out, however, that I had not read this one before.
[a:Phil Rickman|182452|Phil Rickman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1292252234p2/182452.jpg]'s early books were of the fantasy/horror genre, but he seems to have been moving in his more recent ones more towards the crime and detective genre. In this one, however, he seems to have been trying to give equal prominence, switching scenes between the Revd Merrily Watkins, Church of England Vicar of Ledwardine in Herefordshire, who is also the diocesan exorsist, but with the updated and rather twee title of "deliverance consultant", and Hereford detectives Annie Howe and Francis Bliss who do their detecting while trying to keep their affair secret from their colleagues.
It's a while since I've seen a new Phil Rickman book -- as I noted, the last one turned out to be a false alarm, mutton dressed as lamb. Perhaps I have rosy memories of his style, or perhaps his writing style has changed, but I found this one stylistically disappointing. I don't know whether is writing style has got worse, or whether I have just become more critical.
One of the problems is that he has sudden changes of scene, but the characters are only indicated by pronouns. So you have "he said" and "she said", but only halfway through the paragraph do you realise that the he and she are not the same people who were in the previous paragraph, and go back to the beginning and read it with different characters in mind.
In the first few chapters, in Particular, it looks as though Rickman has been reading the elementary text books on fiction writing that give advice to wannabe writers -- especially the advice to end every chapter with a cliffhanger. The problem is that for the first 15 chapters or so the build up to the cliffhanger falls flat in the next chapter, so that every chapter begins with an anticlimax. This becomes tiresome after a while. So one learns that people have been terrible things in a churchyard. It turns out to have been morris dancing.
I first learnt about morris dancing from the comic strip The Perishers, which appeared in the Daily Mirror back in the 1960s. The role of the morris men in the comic strip was never terribly clear, but they struck me as nostalgic old gits who were trying to keep alive imagined traditions of a Merrie England that had never existed. Twenty years later I saw them performing in real life in a series of church fetes in Pretoria, the ind of events announced on their posters as a "Fayre". I once made a video juxtaposing them with a group of Pedi women doing a folk dance in what is now Limpopo province, but was then called the Northern Transvaal. Two folk traditions, one local, the other imported.
Rickman tried to introduce morris dancing as though it was uncanny, spooky and scary, but in my experience, however, it was just quaint and nostalgic, and morris men no more sinister than people who liked going around ringing church bells.
As the book goes on it gets better, at least as far as the plot is concerned, and I don't think it would be too much of a spoiler to say that ultimately the villain turns out to be capitalism, especially as exemplified by property developers. In that it doesn't differ much from some of the other more recent Phil Rickman books.
I looked at this book very carefully before buying it, to make sure that it was not [b:Midwinter of the spirit|317372|Midwinter of the Spirit (Merrily Watkins, #2)|Phil Rickman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1391314794s/317372.jpg|1779108] sneakily published under a different title, since they have republished old Phil Rickman books under new titles before, as a trap for the unwary.
It turned out, however, that I had not read this one before.
[a:Phil Rickman|182452|Phil Rickman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1292252234p2/182452.jpg]'s early books were of the fantasy/horror genre, but he seems to have been moving in his more recent ones more towards the crime and detective genre. In this one, however, he seems to have been trying to give equal prominence, switching scenes between the Revd Merrily Watkins, Church of England Vicar of Ledwardine in Herefordshire, who is also the diocesan exorsist, but with the updated and rather twee title of "deliverance consultant", and Hereford detectives Annie Howe and Francis Bliss who do their detecting while trying to keep their affair secret from their colleagues.
It's a while since I've seen a new Phil Rickman book -- as I noted, the last one turned out to be a false alarm, mutton dressed as lamb. Perhaps I have rosy memories of his style, or perhaps his writing style has changed, but I found this one stylistically disappointing. I don't know whether is writing style has got worse, or whether I have just become more critical.
One of the problems is that he has sudden changes of scene, but the characters are only indicated by pronouns. So you have "he said" and "she said", but only halfway through the paragraph do you realise that the he and she are not the same people who were in the previous paragraph, and go back to the beginning and read it with different characters in mind.
In the first few chapters, in Particular, it looks as though Rickman has been reading the elementary text books on fiction writing that give advice to wannabe writers -- especially the advice to end every chapter with a cliffhanger. The problem is that for the first 15 chapters or so the build up to the cliffhanger falls flat in the next chapter, so that every chapter begins with an anticlimax. This becomes tiresome after a while. So one learns that people have been terrible things in a churchyard. It turns out to have been morris dancing.
I first learnt about morris dancing from the comic strip The Perishers, which appeared in the Daily Mirror back in the 1960s. The role of the morris men in the comic strip was never terribly clear, but they struck me as nostalgic old gits who were trying to keep alive imagined traditions of a Merrie England that had never existed. Twenty years later I saw them performing in real life in a series of church fetes in Pretoria, the ind of events announced on their posters as a "Fayre". I once made a video juxtaposing them with a group of Pedi women doing a folk dance in what is now Limpopo province, but was then called the Northern Transvaal. Two folk traditions, one local, the other imported.
Rickman tried to introduce morris dancing as though it was uncanny, spooky and scary, but in my experience, however, it was just quaint and nostalgic, and morris men no more sinister than people who liked going around ringing church bells.
As the book goes on it gets better, at least as far as the plot is concerned, and I don't think it would be too much of a spoiler to say that ultimately the villain turns out to be capitalism, especially as exemplified by property developers. In that it doesn't differ much from some of the other more recent Phil Rickman books.