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Phil Rickman's THE PRAYER OF THE NIGHT SHEPHERD contains two of the things I dislike most in crime fiction . . . supernatural woo-woo and religion. And at least I can be grateful for small mercies in that while there's too much of the former, there's not a lot of the latter -- and what there is isn't complimentary. Merrily Watkins is a vicar in the small Herefordshire town of Ledwardine, and also the diocesan exorcist. She has doubts about her calling, and these worries are increased by some miracle recoveries which people are starting to attribute to Merrily and her new Sunday night services. The book weighs in at a gargantuan 600+ pages -- and therein lie most of its problems. There is a thin and substantially better book struggling weakly to get out. At least half of the verbiage could go, as Rickman has the worst case of verbal diarrhoea I've seen for some time. For a mystery novel there's surprisingly little mystery or crime in it -- and even the woo-woo is low on tension. A couple of bodies turn up towards the end, but by that stage I'd lost interest and was pretty much watching paint dry. Much of the action is based at Stanner Hall, a Victorian mansion that's been turned into a hotel by former TV producer Ben Foley and his wife Amber. Ben, a fairly charmless manipulator, wants to attract Sherlock Holmes buffs to the hotel by convincing them that the Hound of the Baskervilles took place in Herefordshire and not on Dartmoor. The mystery based in and around the court and its past and present inhabitants really isn't that fascinating -- and it's made more ponderous by the fact Rickman tells you everything at least half a dozen times and also has a nasty tendency to whisk you off into the sunset (or, more accurately, a snowdrift) just when things start to look promising. And because the focus of the novel swings around so much, what little tension there is is diluted further -- we see things through the eyes of hippy farmer Danny, Merrily, her extremely irritating 17-year-old daughter Jane who is working at the hotel, and Lol, a musician who is embarking on a very tentative affair with Merrily. And meanwhile there are about another eight or ten key characters jostling for the exhausted reader's attention. THE PRAYER OF THE NIGHT SHEPHERD is the sixth in the Merrily Watkins series, so I accept I am gatecrashing the party late. But I so much wanted to find out more about Merrily, a woman with a large number of doubts -- Jane reckons her mum will be out of the church within two years. In many ways the most interesting character is Lol, the diffident musician who is making a comeback after mental health problems. The book's few 'hide behind the sofa' scenes belong to him near the end. Rickman does well when it comes to portraying a beautiful and bleak part of the UK huddled on the border of England and Wales. The snow scenes and claustrophobia of the small town and the rambling vicarage are much more powerful than the plodding hotel scenes which strive too hard for effect. A lot less egg in the pudding would have done the trick.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, November 2004
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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