Cadfael – She Reads Novels

This week, Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon of Stuck in a Book are hosting another of their clubs where bloggers read and write about books published in one particular year. The chosen year this time is 1977 and although at first I thought I might have problems finding anything I wanted to read from that year, it turned out I had two suitable books already. One of them was A Morbid Taste for Bones, the first book in Ellis Peters’ Cadfael mystery series. I’ve been meaning to read this series for years, so 1977 Club seemed like the perfect opportunity to begin!

A Morbid Taste for Bones is set in the spring of 1137 and we first meet Brother Cadfael in the gardens of Shrewsbury Abbey tending the herbs with the assistance of two younger monks, John and Columbanus. John is a down-to-earth, practical young man, although Cadfael doubts whether he has a true vocation for the religious life, while Columbanus is starting to make a name for himself with his visions and dramatic ‘falling fits’. Returning from a trip to St Winifred’s Well in Gwytherin, North Wales, Columbanus claims that the saint has appeared to him, saying that her bones are being neglected by the people of Gwytherin and that she would like to be moved to Shrewsbury Abbey where more pilgrims will be able to visit her. Cadfael can’t help thinking that this seems very convenient, as Prior Robert has been considering ways to attract pilgrims to the Abbey and obtaining the bones of a saint would be the perfect solution!

As a Welshman, Cadfael is chosen as one of a small party of monks to travel into Wales and bring the saint’s relics back to Shrewsbury. However, when they reach Gwytherin they are met with resistance from the local people who don’t want to lose Winifred, especially not to England. Tensions rise and when a murder takes place in the woods, Cadfael works with the victim’s daughter to try to find the killer before an innocent man is accused.

I enjoyed my first Cadfael novel and part of the reason for that was because I really liked the character of Cadfael himself, with his mixture of warmth and intelligence, tolerance and imagination. Having entered the monastery later in life, he has a sort of worldliness that helps him to understand the feelings and motivations of people in the ‘outside world’. This allows him to have some sympathy for Brother John, who is struggling to reconcile his faith with other temptations, and also for Sioned, the young woman from Gwytherin whose father’s murder forms the mystery aspect of the novel.

I loved the way Peters portrays life in a small Welsh community: the village hierarchy, the farming of the land, what people did for entertainment, and most of all, how they felt about monks from England coming to take away the remains of a Welsh saint against their will. I was interested to learn, after finishing the book, that this was based on historical fact and Winifred’s relics really were taken from Wales to Shrewsbury Abbey where they remained until the dissolution of the monasteries in the reign of Henry VIII.

I don’t want to give the impression that this is a heavy or dry historical novel, though, because it isn’t – I found it entertaining and very readable. I already knew I liked Ellis Peters’ writing because I read one of her Cadfael short stories in a Christmas anthology last year, but I think her style is better suited to a full-length novel than it is to the shorter form and I enjoyed this much more. It’s also a good example of how to write a murder mystery without including an excessive amount of violence or unnecessarily graphic descriptions. A good choice for 1977 Club and a promising start to a new series for me!

I should have another 1977 book to tell you about later in the week, but for now here are a few older reviews I have posted of books published in that year: