My Weekly Book

The Wine of Angels - Phil Rickman

My first venture into this author’s work and, on the strength of it, I would definitely come again. The Wine of Angels is a dark and complex story about the forces - both supernatural and considerably more prosaic - that are unleashed in the Herefordshire village of Ledwardine on the appointment of its new priest in charge. She’s a nicotine-addicted single mother by the name of Merrily Watkins.

The powers-that-be in Ledwardine react in their different ways to Merrily. Some resent her and seem only too ready to find an excuse to reject her. Others, with roots that stretch back every bit as far if not further as these supposed traditionalists, welcome her as a catalyst for profound change.

In the meantime Merrily is rattling around a huge and unsuitable vicarage grappling with the expectations set by her supine predecessor, a profound lack of self-confidence, periodic crises of faith, the personal problems of parishioners, the first risky voyages out of the harbour of her teenage daughter, the unwelcome attentions of a sex-crazed organist and the appearances of a positively shamanic gift-shop proprietor who certainly far knows more about what’s happening than she’s letting on.

Too much for one person? Of course it is, especially when her life has hardly been a bed of roses in recent years. As the strain mounts, and Merrily starts to buckle, she threatens to bring the village status quo crashing down with her. And the consequences of that are murderous.

Rickman makes an excellent fist of writing female characters and his two major protagonists, Merrily and her daughter Jane, are alive on the page with a sparky relationship that’s easy to believe in. Bits of their dialogue are laugh-out-loud funny - not least Jane’s spoof of pensioners complaining in the post office queue, and also her mother’s admission of how she got her name.

But I certainly wasn’t laughing for very long. The book is shot through with a black, supernatural chill that doesn’t stop much short of outright horror and the author does a cracking job of swiftly building characters you really care about and then really putting them through the wringer. You end up terrified for the two women and their allies, not wanting to put the book down, but not really fancying turning the page, for fear of what it will reveal.

I love books that produce this effect. Highly recommended.

Some links:

• Phil Rickman’s website
• An interview with Merrily Watkins
• An interview with Phil Rickman
• Wikipedia: Phil Rickman
• Phil Rickman bibliography
• BBC Inside Out: Deliverance ministers

* This year’s challenge is now complete, and this was a fine book with which to do it…

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 8:59 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge, Reads I recommend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.