Author: Ellis Peters
Genre: historical mystery
Number of pages: 263
First published: 1977
Setting: England and Wales
Rating: 3 stars
First sentence: On the fine, bright morning
in early May when the whole sensational affair of the Gwytherin relics may
properly be considered to have begun, Brother Cadfael had been up long before
Prime, pricking out cabbage seedlings before the day was aired, and his thoughts
were all on birth, growth and fertility, not all on graves and reliquaries and
violent deaths, whether of saints, sinners or ordadinary decent fallible men
like himself.
One sentence comment: The book, I believe,
exploited the innocent, though perhaps ignorant, attitudes of the time.
(I get quite annoyed reading along. First
it generally diminished the English monks and raised the personality of the
Wales, an apparent nationalistic attitude. Second, the Christian community is
protrayed as foolish and superstitious except Brother Cadfael. It overlooked
the time when religious spirit was the hightest and monks did lots of research
to protect from an darkness era. Third the detective was done with a plot to
exploit people’s supersitious protensity and cover the truth. I have never seen
a more morally gray detective. And he was a monk, taking advantage of the
monestey system! )
As I read, my frustration grew. The
narrative appears driven by a clear nationalistic agenda, first by generally
diminishing the English monks while elevating the Welsh. Furthermore, the
portrayal of the Christian community as uniformly foolish and superstitious—save
for Brother Cadfael—strikes me as historically inaccurate; it overlooks the
period's profound religious devotion and the monks' vital research efforts that
protected knowledge from a 'dark era.' Most troubling, however, is the central
detective plot: it's an unusually morally gray scheme designed to exploit
people's superstitious nature and deliberately obscure the truth. That the
detective is a monk, actively taking advantage of the monastic system, makes
this moral ambiguity even more objectionable.
