A mysterious benefactor from Shropshire
J. L. Carr
THE POTTER'S FIELD by Ellis Peters Headline, £5.99, pp.309 Writers whose novels tell of some violent act, its investigation and expiation, need more than a fair share of loving kindness. Only last month, at a publisher's starvation party, I met one who had been conditioned. He grinned mirthlessly, rub- bed an ear and told me that he was 'only a crime-writer'.
Take Ellis Peters' splendid novel. The writing is immaculate, its telling restrained, effective and, at times, eloquent. The story moves steadily forward across a believable landscape of time and place. And, because my attention and liking for two or three of its characters immediately was engaged, I always wanted to know what happened next. Briefly, it is a very good book.
Yet its businesslike and enterprising publisher had subtitled it A MEDIAEVAL WHODUNNIT. A whodunnit! Novel. — no. Whodunnit — yes. After a century of public free education it's what the public wants. Research says so. A computer has confirmed it. Sales prove it. It is a law as immutable as the sun in its circulation. (Turn now to Page Three). So be it. Market-forces rule O.K.
You see what I mean about loving kindness.
The Potter's Field (`and they took coun- sel and bought the potter's field to bury strangers in' — Matt. 27, VII) begins during the autumn of 1143 and in Shrewsbury Abbey Chapter House. A neighbouring Priory had sensibly proposed exchange of a distant field, largely willed to it for a nearer one. The suggestion is agreed and Cadvael, the monk who looks after the abbey's garden and, herbarium, is sent to see to the field's cultivation.
Almost at once, the ox-plough's coulter turns up thick tresses of braided hair. By the field's headland and overlooking the Severn, a woman has been decently buried; her ruined hands clasp a cross of bent twigs. A sheriffs inquiry is set in train, profitless trails are pursued, sus- pected persons held and released. At last, the woman is identified, her death ex- plained, lay and church law satisfied. Those are the bare bones of the story. But there are rumours of a distant rebel- lion in Fenland, a charming love affair runs its course, there is a continually engrossing account of day-to-day monastic routine. Throughout (and Ellis Peters is very good at this) one always has time to look around and know exactly where one is.
The distant past is charmed ground: one treads warily. Its folk were not us in fancy dress. They lived dangerously, were en- grossed with getting enough to eat, keep- ing warm, dodging fatal involvement in the ambition of their betters. And how can we square our preoccupation with pensions, package-holiday deals and snooker-by- proxy with their awesome idea of an Almighty Father and an unearthly Son? Yet booksellers report multiplying sales for the Cadvael novels. It seems that, for a feW hours now and then, many of us welcome a withdrawal into a seemingly steady rhythm of rural seasons and 12th- century monastic and town living. And, mentioning seasons, this writer's ice-bound winters, brisk springs and sad autumns are particularly evocative. And so are the landscapes. Three sentences and you are away from choked roads, late trains and booksellers' unpaid bills. You are looking across the river towards deep woodland and, further, beyond Clee and Chun, following a mule-rider into Wales. (There are Saint Winifred's relics to be found and brought back.) This is the 17th novel about Cadvael, that engaging Welsh ex-soldier turned her- balist. On an OUP rep's enthusiastic re- commendation, I first came across him as he rode north to become a Benedictine brother at the tag-end of Henry I's reign. That would be about 1967 for the, first traveller and 1135 for the second.
Since then, almost everything has hap- pened along the upper Powys/Shropshire border during what Muir & Osborne's History Book One (55 BC-1485) labels Stephen's Anarchy . . . 'a time of adulter- ine castle-building when God and his Saints slept'. (Not any longer . . . the textbook was written in pre-Cadvael days). These long-distance book-writers, who provide a succession of novels encompas- sing familiar places and periods into which one can retire and feel at home, are our benefactors. I mean writers like Anthony Trollope, John Galsworthy, Anthony Powell and Ellis Peters.
But who is Ellis Peters? Despite 40 novels and many thousands of admirers, this last benefactor remains a shadowy figure up there in Shropshire. One must fall back on speculation. Why, for inst- ance, has Ellis Peters done so much, by visits and by translations, for the Czechs? It appears to have begun 40 years ago when a Workers Educational Association group visited Prague. Many of us still have 1938 on our consciences but Ellis Peters did something about it. Why? One mustn't ask too many questions. They might lead back to the Bloomsbury industry.
Well, one question . . . why do some writers find 'Ellis' so attractive a pseudonym? It brings back a wartime afternoon in the back streets of Lagos. I came across an upper room — LENDING LIBRARY FOR DISTRESSED AND SHIP- WRECKED MARINERS. There was no libra- rian — only an exercise-book and a pencil stub to record borrowings. No acquisitions seem to have been made since the turn of the century. Perhaps even before that. I found Jane Eyre by Currer Bell and Wuthering Heights by his brother Ellis.
A last question and not mine. Writers tell me that, at public meetings, the most disconcerting enquiry is, 'Do you write under your own name?' Do they, in turn, ask savagely, 'Do you cook/ lay bricks/ make love under your own name?' (Only the last might cause distress). And only a few, a very few like Ellis Peters, can answer boldly, 'No, of course not. Ellis Peters is a shadowy figure up there in Shropshire. I am Edith Pargeter.'
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