Skip to main content

Review: The Hermit of Eyton Forest by Ellis Peters

Genre: Historical mystery.
Themes: Deception, escape, forced marriage, murder.
Reading challenge: What's in a Name, the book with a profession in the title, and my final book for this challenge.

I was planning to read a piece of social history, What the Butler Saw: Two hundred and fifty years of the servant problem, for this challenge, but looking over my bookshelves I spotted the 8 books I had left to read in the Brother Cadfael historical mystery series, and couldn't resist picking the next one as the final book in the challenge: The Hermit of Eyton Forest.

Now, some might say that being a hermit is a religious vocation rather than a profession, but in fact there once existed a professional class of ornamental or garden hermits. They were men who were specifically hired and paid to live in hermitages or other suitable structures on great estates and to be full-time hermits for a given length of time, generally seven years.

I read the previous book in the series, The Rose Rent, in September 2012. Coming back to Cadfael after an absence of four years was like running into an old friend and immediately falling into the camaraderie you had when you last met, many years ago.

Two plots intertwine in the story: There is the young boy entrusted by his ailing father to the abbot for education and upbringing and to keep him away from his scheming, ambitious grandmother, and then there is the newly arrived holy man, the hermit of the title, and his young assistant, who may or may not be an escaped villein with his lord in hot pursuit. Then there is the matter of a guest at the abbey who shows mysterious behaviour, and the civil war looms in the background. There is also the inevitable romance sub-plot.

Peters' style is as skilful as ever, and the book was a joy to read, even if I pretty much foresaw every plot revelation before it happened. This is perhaps because she, unlike for example Agatha Christie, plays fair with the reader. There are no red herrings dragged across the trail here, just a fair laying-out of the facts and no twisting of narrative conventions. The joy of reading a book like this is not in the who or even the why, but how the author resolves the mystery.

In other words: If you are conversant with the genre you can pretty much guess what's going to happen before it happens, but don't let that stop you from reading it because it's a satisfying read.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...
25 comments
Read more

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...
9 comments
Read more