Has Moments of Fun, But Can Be Annoying - A Review of An Ancient Evil

[kamreadsandrecs]

An Ancient Evil by Paul Doherty

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


It has been a long while since I read Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in full. The first time I encountered the work was in high school, when we read an excerpt from the Wife of Bath’s Tale, but it was only when I got to university that I was able to read the work in its entirety. It’s not an easy read at all - Chaucer’s Middle English (a style even older than Shakespeare’s) is hard to get accustomed to, even without having to take the idiosyncrasies of the time period into consideration as well. I was fortunate to have access to a heavily-annotated and copiously-footnoted edition while at university, and that helped significantly in understanding the context of the tales, as did having access to the other books in the library and online journals.

Despite that, though, I have never really found much appeal in Chaucer’s work. I understand why some people enjoy it, but reading it requires more drudge work than I strictly like. I suppose if I could get ahold of Peter Ackroyd’s modern English adaptation I could attempt to read it again, but since I do not have any particular inclination to do so it might be a while yet before I reread Chaucer’s greatest work.

That does not mean, however, I am uninterested in works that play around with Chaucer’s work. So when Unbound Worlds shared this list of four books inspired by The Canterbury Tales, my interest was piqued, and I chose to give the last one on the list, Paul Doherty’s An Ancient Evil, a shot.

An Ancient Evil is framed as a darker parallel to Chaucer’s work. It is the first book in a series called the Canterbury Tales Mysteries, or Stories Told on Pilgrimage from London to Canterbury, and is told by the Knight of Chaucer’s original. It follows Sir Godfrey Evesden and his companion, Alexander McBain, as they investigate some very strange goings-on at Oxford. People have gone missing, or turned up brutally murdered - and if nothing is done, Oxford will explode in riot if the tensions between various factions in Oxford reach breaking point. Assisted by the blind anchorite and exorcist Edith Mohun, Godfrey and Alexander attempt to discover just who or what is causing the deaths and disappearances in Oxford - before the city is drenched in even more blood.

One of the hallmarks of a good horror novel is how the monster (or whatever is the source of the scare) is handled. In my opinion, the longer a monster remains out of sight, the better; after all, the imagination is much better at scaring the reader than anything any author can ever describe. If the author does choose to reveal the monster right at the beginning, though, then said author ought to be able to structure the plot such that it remains terrifying despite its identity being known to the reader. Some authors are quite good at this, and when they get it right, those monsters linger in the imagination long after the reader has closed the book.

In the case of An Ancient Evil, the reader goes into the story already knowing just what kind of monster Godfrey and Alexander face in Oxford, but unlike the authors who can make that monster linger at the back of the reader’s head long after he or she has finished the story, Doherty is unable to make his monsters particularly scary. Oh, to be sure, they are terrifying because of the things they do to innocent characters, but they do not haunt the reader. Indeed, they rather strike me as Scooby-Doo-esque, especially when they do things like what happens in the following excerpt:

… Dame Veronica hurried before him and stopped in the middle of the cemetery, which was dominated by a great wooden cross carved in the Celtic fashion. A small stone altar lay beneath it and in front of the altar, Alexander glimpsed three upturned crosses. Dame Veronica pointed, then turned away. Sir Godfrey took one of the tapers and squatted down, Alexander standing behind him. …

…

‘Three crosses,’ Sir Godfrey said thoughtfully.

He pulled one out of the ground and placed it flat on the earth. He drew his dagger and prised loose the dead bat that had been pinned to the centre of the crosspiece. …

‘Three crosses,’ he murmured. ‘Each with a bat nailed through it and our names carved beneath: Sir Godfrey Evesden, Alexander McBain and Dame Edith Mohun.’

Now, to be fair to the author, the above scene would be disconcerting to someone in the Middle Ages, while I, as a child of the twenty-first century, find crucified bats more absurd than scary. It smacks of behaviour that on the Internet is attributed to people called “edgelords,” described in Urban Dictionary as “someone…who uses shocking or nihilistic speech and opinions that they themselves may or may not actually believe to gain attention and come across as a more dangerous and unique person.” As a consequence, reading about three crucified bats makes me want to roll my eyes instead of feel concerned for the characters.

Still, I cannot help but think that there are other portrayals that could make the villains come off as terrifying both to the characters in the context of their milieu, and to the reader in the context of his or hers. The author is more than capable of it, as the following excerpt proves:

’And who was the Guardian?’

Laetitia licked her lips and rammed her hands in her lap. ‘I am a poor girl,’ she added archly.

Alexander pressed a coin into her fingers. The girl looked up. She glimpsed the white face pressed against the casement window behind her three interrogators. She didn’t blink, she just stared; the face was white, the eyes large dark pool of murderous malice. A finger came up to the face’s lips as a sign for silence. Laetitia’s jaw dropped. She blinked and, when she looked again, the face had disappeared. …

This scene dripped ice down my spine, even in broad daylight - enough that I had to look at the windows behind me just to make sure that someone was not watching me through them. To be sure, it’s not a particularly complicated scene, and not very nuanced either, but it is striking in its simplicity, as well as practically universal. Everyone fears the unseen watcher in the dark, and this scene illustrates that fear very well. It is a pity that there are not more scenes like it, because despite the monsters in this novel being of the kind that have been overrepresented in recent mainstream media, the author’s portrayal of them hews close enough to the old folklore that they could be sufficiently scary to read about. Unfortunately, the author is unable to capitalise on that and wastes whatever potential terror that return to the old folktales could generate.

Another annoying aspect of this novel is how it combines the horror-mystery plot with the romance plot. While I have nothing wrong with a romantic plot line in any sort of story, I do expect that plot to make sense in the greater overall context. That is not the case, unfortunately, in this novel. Take this excerpt, for example:

The conversation ceased at a loud knocking on the door. The abbess entered, leading a rather dishevelled soldier…

‘He’s from the sheriff,’ she announced.

‘Sir Oswald,’ the messenger closed his eyes, ‘Sir Oswald sends his, sends his…’

‘Compliments,’ Sir Godfrey suggested testily.

‘No, sir, his greetings. He desires your presence in the castle immediately.’

‘Why?’ Alexander asked.

… ‘God knows, master, but they did bring a body in this morning. All blood and gore seeping through a sheet. It was still dripping when Sir Oswald ordered it to be taken down to one of the cellars.’

‘Another death,’ the exorcist murmured. ‘Perhaps we should start at the castle.’

…

… As they passed the rain-soaked gardens they heard a young girl singing. Alexander stopped.

‘That’s a French song, isn’t it? “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, “The Lady without Pity”.’

And, without being invited, Alexander walked through a gap in the privet hedge that shielded the singer. His face softened as he glimpsed Lady Emily standing next to a small fountain, a brilliantly white dove resting on her gloved hand. She was stroking its breast gently, singing to it, completely absorbed in what she was doing.

Sir Godfrey joined him. Both men stood in speechless admiration, of the early morning sun caught the young woman’s unbraided hair and created a golden aureole around it. In her long dress of murrey, bound at the waist by a silver coord, she reminded Alexander of a fairy princess he had glimpsed in a Book of Legends in a wooden-panelled library at Cambridge.

There are other scenes similar to the one above, but they all share that same, stilted quality that makes it seem like the author is reconstructing one of Edmund Leighton’s medieval-themed paintings, except in prose. Additionally, this whole subplot often derails the more urgent, and by far more interesting, main plot. At the start of this excerpt a dead body has just come in, another murder has been committed, and yet all sense of urgency is put aside for the sake of a pointless romantic interlude that has absolutely nothing to do with the main plot.

It is also clear - and quite early on in this novel, at that - that this romantic subplot serves no other purpose than to create an unnecessary rivalry between Godfrey and Alexander, perhaps in some misguided attempt to create conflict to further character development. I truly wish that was not the case though, because there are so many other ways to generate conflict between those two characters. One example is that Godfrey is a war-hardened knight, whereas Alexander is an intellectual scholar. That difference alone could be mined for so much potential conflict and character growth, especially when it comes to trying to solve the mystery at the heart of this novel, that I do not understand why the author had to resort to some tawdry romantic subplot in order to achieve a goal that could have been attained in other ways.

(I suspect that is the case because the romantic rivalry is the easier of the two to write out, whereas a rivalry based on any other form of conflict would require a bit more forethought, especially where it tangles with the main plot. Of course, the latter would be far more satisfactory to read about than the former, but perhaps the author was not particularly inclined to strain himself overmuch in putting in the necessary effort to do so.)

Despite that poorly-shoehorned romance, though, the actual plot of the novel is remarkably fun to read about. The mystery is perhaps not as complex or as twisty as some of the other mysteries I have read, but it is entertaining enough to be enjoyable. The unique setting also goes a way towards making the story more fun to read; it is interesting reading how the characters figure out the identity of their culprit without the sophisticated technology and forensics of the twenty-first century, or even the less-advanced detection and investigative methods portrayed in the Sherlock Holmes stories. The author is masterful at recreating the period in which this novel is set, and so it is easy for the reader to immerse himself or herself in the setting and get well and truly lost in it.

As for the characters, the men might be front-and-centre in this story, but they are less intriguing than the women. Edith Mohun, for example, is utterly fascinating to read about, as is Lady Emily: both are strong-willed women, albeit in very different ways. Edith, for instance, is clearly the brains of the operation where the investigation into the murders is concerned, oftentimes directing Sir Godfrey and Alexander on what to do and where to go whenever something unexpected crops up. It is also she who explains various obscure bits of information that elude even Cambridge-trained Alexander, to say nothing of Sir Godfrey, who as a knight would lack the same kind of formal education that Alexander and Edith would have.

Lady Emily, on the other hand, is implied to be quite cunning, using her youth and beauty to her advantage so that, though she is a ward of the king, she still holds on to enough independence that she maintains control of her lands, and is implied to be free to marry anyone she so chooses without royal interference. That level of freedom is almost unheard-of in the Middle Ages, where any wealthy unmarried woman who fell under the wardship of the crown could be married off to anyone the reigning monarch deemed suitable. For Lady Emily to exert such great control over her destiny implies that she is capable of wielding every single advantage given to her for her own ends - and is not above manipulating those around her, even the king himself, if it will get her what she wants.

Unfortunately, these women tend to take a backseat to the men, who are the primary characters of this novel and around whom most of the action revolves. It is a pity that Edith does not get the starring role she most clearly deserves, and Lady Emily is reduced to nothing more than an object for the two men to argue over: an illustration of how this novel fails the Sexy Lamp Test despite Lady Emily’s intriguing background.

Overall, An Ancient Evil is a potentially entertaining read. The mystery plot at the heart of the novel is not as dense or as complicated as some other mysteries out there, but it is sufficiently entertaining, and will likely hold the reader’s attention long enough to get to the end (even if the reader can quite easily guess who the murderer is before the characters do). Unfortunately, the story is hobbled by a pointless romantic subplot and monsters that are not nearly scary enough to really leave an impression on the reader. This book does its job, to be sure, but it does nothing more than that, and therefore is not greater than it could be.