A Vicar, Crucified (An Abbot Peter Mystery)
Simon Parke
DLT £7.99
(978-0-232-52997-5)
Church Times Bookshop £7.20 (Use code
CT366 )
"SURELY the first crucifixion ever on the south coast of
England!" exclaims the horrified Abbot Peter when he hears that the
Revd Anton Fontaine has been discovered hanging naked from a cross
in the vestry, dead. Fontaine was vicar of Stormhaven, the quiet
seaside town that Abbot Peter has retired to.
There are seven likely suspects: six are members of the PCC,
allare closely connected to the parish, and all had a grudge of
some sort against Fontaine. Which of them did it? The police
investigation gets nowhere until Abbot Peter joins the inquiry.
Simon Parke has invented an unlikely hero, but, though the
Abbot's recent service as abbot of a remote monastery in the Sinai
desert hardly fits him to becomea Special Witness assisting the
police, he is a shrewd judge of character.
Indeed, the unlikely is a featureof Parke's novel: Abbot Peter
discovers that he is the uncleof the detective on the case, Tamsin
Shah; their family link is through the eccentric Russian mystic G.
I. Gurdjieff, whose fame rests on his connection with the Sarmoun
community in Afghanistan and its particular belief system involving
the mystical Enneagram, a circle bisected into nine points.
No, I hadn't heard of it either, but Parke is an exponent of its
use and power, and has put it at the heart of his story, providing
in addition two explanatory appendices at the end of the book: a
diagram and an analysis of the types of human being revealed by
each of the Enneagram's nine points.
The story in itself is good, the murderer's identity is well
concealed, and the dialogue is convincing and often funny (Parke
was a scriptwriter for Spitting Image); but at the heart
of the book there is a curious absence of feeling. When the second
victim's body is discovered, there's no horror. Terrible events are
described in the same tones as the Winter Fair. The lack of heart
may be due to Parke's schema: everything has to fitround the nine
aspects of personality types as defined by the Enneagram, and maybe
this has a limiting rather than a liberating effect.
Peggy Woodford is a novelist.