So if this was the Age of the Train, it was one with advertisements fronted by Jimmy Savile. In came surprisingly troublesome attempts at fast trains that tilted (to get round curves) which left passengers feeling it made the going queasy. Out went the esprit de corps of coalmen and firedroppers, cranemen and shedmen, water-softening-plant attendants and timekeepers. It wasn’t nationalisation that made the railways lovable any more than privatisation in 1997 directly caused train crashes. British railways have always been astonishingly badly run. As with democracy, though, the railway is the worst form of travel except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time. Christopher Howse is author of The Train in Spain (Bloomsbury)
OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH
Murder in the vicarage REVEREND JONATHAN AITKEN Murder Before Evensong Reverend Richard Coles Weidenfeld & Nicolson £16.99 The Reverend Richard Coles is already famous as a colourful clerical character and a pop star in the Communards. But the flashy stuff he struts on Strictly Come Dancing and on TV chat shows is lightweight ephemera compared with his sparkling new literary creation, Murder Before Evensong – the first novel in the Canon Clement Mystery series. Canon Daniel Clement is the Rector of Champton St Mary’s, a jewel of Perpendicular architecture, where time has stood still. The church has managed without a lavatory for four centuries. The novel opens with an exquisitely comic account of a church meeting at which leading members of the congregation oppose the rector’s plans to modernise the facilities. Their reasons range from ‘No one wants to hear flushing during worship’ and objections to removing pews, to darker unexplained secrets which go back to the wartime billeting of Free French Officers in Champton. The plot tickles rather than thickens in the early chapters, as Coles entertains his readers with a pyrotechnic display of literary skills. These include similes worthy of P G Wodehouse. A son of the village squire has ‘the frog-faced look of
an unmistakable English aristocrat’ whose stately home is ‘as cosy as a Cistercian monastery’. Several of the character portraits are up to the high standards set by Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers. This reviewer laughed out loud over the diocesan bishop’s visitation on a mission to promote a parish merger of Champton St Mary with Upper and Lower Balsaddle. With the Rector and the Lord of the Manor (also the patron of the living) regarding the neighbouring Balsaddles as ‘like Ulan Bator’, the episcopal mission fails. Readers will laugh over multiple passages throughout the book. Coles has a gift for subtle comic writing, with echoes of Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage, A G Macdonell’s England, Their England, Penelope Keith in To the Manor Born and Dawn French playing the vicar of Dibley. If he can keep this up for a series, Coles will surely have his niche in the pantheon of English literary humour. The central character of the book, Canon Daniel Clement, is a quintessential if mythical figure, the saintly English country vicar. He has no faults at all except his bad driving. He loves his dogs, his mother, the daily offices, the Coverdale translation of the Psalms and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. He knows his parishioners well, extending the benefit of the doubt and forgiveness to even the most irritating and wayward sheep of his fold. But not quite. This scholarly rector becomes worldly wise and intuitively suspicious as the plot begins to develop. When murder most foul hits Crampton, Canon Clement gradually morphs into Miss Marple with a dog
collar. He befriends the detective in charge of the case or cases, DS Vanloo. Together they narrow down the suspects. No plot-spoiling here, but watch out for the ancient wartime secrets and their link with medieval – as distinct from Victorian – pews. As a mystery story, this book manages to maintain momentum right to the end of its 358 pages. Yet the greatest joy of Murder Before Evensong is the quality and at times brilliance of the author’s writing. Coles is not only good at humour; he can also capture atmospherics, essences, ambience and even smells. Here is an elegant extract about Canon Clement’s beloved dachshunds, Cosmo and Hilda, and their olfactory instincts: ‘Their enjoyment of scent, even the most pungently revolting, was utterly promiscuous. He watched them sometimes suddenly sniff, not a delicate savouring of a faint scent like a parfumier, but something which involved the whole body, a great Hoover that came from the depths of their long chests, sucking the smells through their flaring nostrils, and sending the data into the large part of their small brains that decoded scent.’ Canon Clement’s nose for the scent of the village murderer brings the novel to an exciting denouement. And beyond the fascinating story with its rich characters, the real discovery here is the sniffing out of the author’s formidable talent for writing about English life with English humour. Roll on the rest of the series! Reverend Jonathan Aitken is a former Cabinet Minister and prisoner. He is now Chaplain of Pentonville Prison The Oldie June 2022 61
