The Prayer of the Night Shepherd by
Philip Rickman
hbk out April 04
Published by Macmillan
at £16.99
Another very welcome blockbuster from Phil Rickman, the sixth in his
Revd. Merrily Watkins series about the diffident lady vicar of a
Herefordshire village, who is also 'Deliverance Consultant' to the diocese,
lumbered with the difficult task of dealing with possession, exorcism and the
interface between Christianity and the paranormal.
Just beyond Kington, the last little town before the Welsh border, is a
decaying Victorian mansion at the foot of a strange geological formation
called Stanner Rocks - which actually exists. Ben Foley, a former television
producer, takes it on as a hotel, but it is rapidly failing. His last hopes of
survival rest on its tenuous connection with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as there
is a possibility that The Hound of the Baskervilles was based on a local
fourteenth century legend and that Doyle stayed at the house and became
involved in some of the paranormal activities which he so strongly espoused
in later life.
Ben plans a televised séance to bolster the strength of his claim, hoping to
get a Holmesian Society to hold their annual conference there, but the whole
enterprise goes progessively pear-shaped. Merrily's pagan daughter Jane
gets a part-time job at the hotel and gets sucked into the strange goings-on,
which get more and more complex when a snow-storm cuts off the area as
the action reaches its climax with a murder on Stanner Rocks. Merrily has
several other problems to deal with, but ends up doing an exorcism and
baptism at dawn in a house full of snowbound CID and SOCOS.
There are lots of sub-plots and twists and turns, mainly based on a legacy of
hereditary evil and madness traceable back from present-day families in that
strange valley, to Black Vaughan, whose tomb and that of his murderous
wife lies in Kington church. The Welsh Border tales of a great black hound,
that Doyle may have moved to Dartmoor for his story, still surface locally -
and of course, we still have the nearby Powys Puma going strong in 2003.
Phil Rickman's genius, apart from being a cracking good writer, is his
ability to weave together murderous crime with enough mysticism and
hauntings to make his stories totally believable, yet leave the reader with the
deliciously uneasy feeling that there remains unfinished spooky business
lurking behind the last page. His handling of dialogue is unmatchable and it
is impossible to believe that his characters don't exist in real fact - especially
ones like little 'Gomer Parry Plant Hire', who happily appears in every book
with his flat cap and miniscule self-rolled fag.
The other strength is the way in which his writing is so firmly based on
existing legends and local topography. Set in the strange, remote
countryside of the Welsh Border, he takes some sinister folk tale and builds
his complex plot around it, revealing the depth of research that must have
gone into the preparation of the book. I read The Prayer in strictly rationed
instalments to make the enjoyment last longer and with a large-scale
Ordnance Survey map and a magnifying glass alongside me, to follow the
almost totally authentic geography that he uses. If there was such an
organisation as the Herefordshire Borders Tourist Board, they should give
Phil a medal, as I'm sure this summer will see readers converging on
Kington to look at the tomb in the ancient church and Stanner Rocks - and
scannning the horizon in the hope of seeing a large black dog loping across
Hergest Ridge!
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
The Prayer of the Night Shepherd by
Philip Rickman
