Reviews for Fludd

The average rating for Fludd based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-09-28 00:00:00 David Cheng One of Hilary Mantel's early novels; this is quite an oddity and if you have a working knowledge of the Catholic Church, very funny. It is set in northern England in the mid 1950s in a mill town on the edge of a bleak moor. The Catholicism is pre Vatican 2 and very Latin; heavily laced with superstition. The novel revolves around the parish priest Father Angwin who long ago lost his faith and believes only in the devil and tradition. He is plagued by the Bishop who is modern and trying to bring the Church into the twentieth century. There is also a convent with nuns who teach in the local school. The characterisation is strong and even the minor players are well drawn with substance, and it is the very human frailty of the characters that make them likeable. The nuns are making a tapestry of the ten plagues of Egypt; "Now we are up to boils". This is a very competent dissection of superstition, but it is done with warmth and without cruelty; and there are some great quotes: "The Protestants were damned, of course, by reason of this culpable ignorance. They would roast in hell. A span of seventy years, to ride bicycles in the steep streets, to get married, to eat bread and dripping: then bronchitis, pneumonia, a broken hip: then the minister calls, and the florist does a wreath: then devils will tear their flesh with pincers. It is a most neighbourly thought." The centre of the story is Fludd, the new curate of the parish; he is an enigma and his effect on those around him; take for instance the priest's housekeeper Miss Dempsey: ''Deep within her, behind her cardigan and her blouse and her petticoat trimmed with scratchy nylon lace, behind her interlock vest and freckled skin, Miss Dempsey sensed a slow movement, a tiny spiral shift of matter, as if, at the very moment the curate spoke, a change had occurred: a change so minute as to baffle description, but rippling out, in its effect, to infinity.'' He has a similar effect on a young Irish nun, Sister Philomena, who has had to leave Ireland for pretending her dermatitis was stigmata. The real question is who is Fludd? Is he an angel, or is he, more pertinently, the devil. He certainly is not a priest! The combination of humour and symbolism is a delight; it does help if you have some basic knowledge of the Catholic Church, but the questions are eternal ones. Sadistic nuns, an atheist priest, the saga of the buried statues (and their resurrection), devout (but ignorant) parishioners, a tobacconist who may also be the devil and the inscrutable Fludd. There is a great deal going on and it is fun and life affirming and about finding oneself.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-05-07 00:00:00 Damar Jones It has been a hot sunny holiday weekend here in the UK and this is the third book I have finished in the last three days. This one was another treat - a comic novel reminiscent of the best of Iris Murdoch. The book is set in the 1950s in a fictitious Northern Catholic village which appears to be situated in upper Longdendale, as it lies near the railway between Dinting and the Woodhead tunnel, and it has a bus that comes from Glossop. So perhaps Hadfield, which will be familiar to fans of the League of Gentlemen, and I suppose one could make parallels as this novel gets quite surreal at times. The central conceit is that Fludd, a reincarnated 16th century alchemist, appears in the parish purporting to be a curate and transforms the limited lives of the local priest (who has lost his faith and his respect for his modernising bishop) and a downtrodden Irish nun. Mantel clearly enjoyed satirising the excesses of the Roman church and other Northern cliches, and like Iris Murdoch she smuggles some deeper religious and philosophical into what is essentially a light hearted comic fantasy.