Hilary Mantel, Fludd (Viking, 1989)

I only discovered Hilary Mantel fairly recently, though I had long known of her: she was one of those writers floating dimly somewhere near the back of my mind, an awareness, almost an intention, that never seemed to transform itself into any actual reading.  And then, when I finally got round to it, a real regret that I deprived myself of the pleasure for so long.

The first book of Mantel's that I read was her wonderful memoir, Giving up the Ghost (2003), followed swiftly by Beyond Black (2005), an equally wonderful and very dark tale which brilliantly combined the otherworldly with the prosaic - the central character is a medium who plies her trade in the theatres and conference centres of the M4 corridor.  Sharing some territory with both books is Fludd, an earlier and shorter novel.  The setting, a Derbyshire village in the mid-50s, is that of Mantel's childhood, while the Catholic congregation around which the drama unfolds is steeped in a mysticism so innate that its details become commonplaces.  This is a portrait of a community for which religion is simply the stuff of life, its lexicon and its iconography known by heart - a place where the extraordinary is ordinary, but where, by the end of the novel, the ordinary will have recovered its ability to become extraordinary.  

Father Angwin has lost his faith, but finds this little hindrance to ministering to the needs of his flock, who, whether nuns, schoolgirls, members of the Children of Mary or the Men's Fellowship, go unquestioningly about their devotions in the permanently damp Derbyshire countryside.  A visit from the Bishop, however, presages the arrival of Fludd, a new curate sent to assist Father Angwin.  But who exactly is he?  And why has he come to this otherwise neglected backwater? Slowly, as Fludd works his way into the affections of the Fetherhoughtonians, the answers to these questions begin to unfold.  Life in the village, particularly for a certain young nun, will never be the same again.

The great joy of Mantel's writing is in its poetic accuracy and wry humour.  Each sentence brings the idiosyncracies of Fetherhougton and its inhabitants before us in a curiously slanted light, not unlike that of the Derbyshire summer itself, which, "a thick grey blanket, had pinned itself to the windows".  Mantel's prose avoids calling attention to itself, continuing pointing beyond the words to the precise and often strange reality beyond.  Lesser writers get stuck in their own cleverness, or poetic-ness, or whatever they think their own particular talent is, and forget that the words on the page are merely a veil, as permeable as they can make it, through which the stuff of the fiction shines through, more rather than less vivid for the language which presents it to the reader.   

For me, the pleasure of reading Fludd was also in recognising a place I know.  The setting sounds very like the Hope Valley, where a group of Quakers live in a residential community in the village of Bamford (www.quakercommunity.org.uk), to which we are regular visitors:

"Tiny distant figures swarmed over the hummocks and hills; they were Water Board men, Forestry Commission.  In the folds of the hills there were pewter-coloured reservoirs, hidden from sight.  The first event of the autumn was the snowfall that blocked the pass that led through the moors to Yorkshire; this was generally accounted a good thing."

The Quaker community is housed in the converted Water Board headquarters, built around the turn of the century; about forty-five minutes' walk away, up a track fashioned out of a disused railway line, lies the Ladybower Reservoir.  Other reservoirs do indeed reveal themselves to view around sudden bends in the high paths over the moors; the pass referred to is surely Snake Pass, whose closure by snow is still taken by the Met Office to mark the beginning of the cold weather.  It is an area of outstanding beauty - it is in Mantel's fictional interests to make it sound rather grimmer than it is, at least in my experience - and I urge everyone to visit it, Fludd in hand.  Both will reward the effort.