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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Church of England hi-jinks in the North, 9 Feb 2004
i practically read this at one sitting, which is not to belie Fox's intellectual clarity and emotional wealth. She works great riches into a story that nonetheless remains as effortlessly readable as airport fiction, quite a feat, i am envious.The novel is about an initially rather smug and unfortunately bourgeois (and no doubt C.S. Lewis-reading) Christian curate who lapses or dives into her own desires and so comes to a mature sureness of her own full humanity, in its 'blood and mire' as Yeats might say. It is a damn fine novel. You should read it with a bottle of red wine and some good bread. My only cavils would be that Fox's world-view seems to shrink with each novel, so where her first was on the promising, bleeding edge between the drowned and the saved (in religious terms), in this latest nearly every character is either Xian or about to become so, but i suppose one writes from what one knows; and believes. My other perhaps churlish objection is that many characters, such as the quite splendid Andrew Jacks, wouldn't make full sense had one not read Fox's earlier works, and it would be a shame to lose some of her breadth and detail. It's a pity these novels are largely out-of-print, but they should be passed around and borrowed from libraries and read with great pleasure. i wouldn't have thought i'd ever enjoy C of E related novels, but there you go. Tolle, legge!
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by Catherine Fox
by Catherine Fox
by Paul H. Ballard
by Catherine Fox
