A Morbid Taste for Bones

 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.