Ordinary Time

GMW Wemyss returns us, in this the fifth narrative instalment of the Village Tales series, to the (sometimes) placid villages of the Woolfonts and the Downlands, the Vale and the sleepy market towns of Beechbourne and of Chickmarsh; to skylark and bustard, sheep and pasture, wood, chalk-stream, steam railway, and pub; and to Wolfdown House, where the peppery duke of Taunton is learning life over again, to the relief of all who know him. This is 2017 in the villages and the country 'round: the General Election, Brexit, terror attacks in London and Manchester ... and a troubling murder in Canon Paddick's native Wolverhampton. Yet all is older than it seems: the immemorial patterns of life and death, of births and baptisms and burials; the eternal verities; the profound continuity of present and deep past. His Grace marries Lady Lacy even as the greatest archaeological dig in Britain raises its steam; his widowed sister-in-law marries the local vet.; the niece of his old friend the Nawab marries. The past informs the present, from one of Guthrum's Vikings discovered in the Rectory garden, eleven centuries on, to ancient trackways and modern boundaries. Justice prevails; evil fails; and, though peers and priests, politicians and ploughmen, may pass in time, and saints, scholars, and shepherds alike flourish and are cut down, sheep and songs and standing stones, pigs and parishes, go on forever in the deepest story of changeless Britain. In this, Part One of the novel, there are the much-anticipated marriages; the slow gathering of steam at the Dig; tragedy and crime in the West Midlands; the discovery, in the Rectory garden, of rather a startling raider of Guthrum's forces after eleven centuries; and governmental haplessness, miching mallecho, and other proofs of the deep, the profound, continuity of present and past. Mr Wemyss is an historian, poet, novelist, annotator of Kipling and of Grahame, and beloved West Country essayist. The preceding volumes in this series are Cross and Poppy; Evensong; The Day Thou Gavest; and Ye Little Hills Like Lambs; and the collection, Sermons in Chalk.