Medieval evils

Press, 24 September 1988, Page 27

Medieval evils

The Hermit of Eyton Forest. By Ellis Peters. Futura/Macdonald, 1988. 224 pp. $10.99 (paperback). It is surprisingly good to be back in the twelfth-century environs of Shrewsbury, with the clever, gentle Brother Cadfael as he unravels the simple but nonetheless evil designs of the time. In and around the quiet Abbey, there are deaths, murders, abductions, and mysterious goings on in the woods, as the Abbot and Brothers try to get from vespers to matins and back again with minimal disturbance to their tranquillity. Meanwhile, the hermit is rather more than he seems. The characters are as engaging as usual and the plot of “The Hermit of Eyton Forest” is plausible. Brother Cadfael continues to be a good enough mixture of the spiritual and the

secular to use his intelligence and acumen to solve the local crimes. He is a private eye before his time, his foil the Sheriff Hugh Beringer at Shrewsbury ■ Castle, a prototype man from The Yard. These domestic dramas are played out against a background of civil war, which centres on the clash of steel and the laying of sieges. This series (“The Hermit” is the fourteenth) grows on the reader. Brother Cadfael will certainly take his place among the all-time list of interesting fictional detectives. And there is a sense in which Ellis Peters is convincing with the people of the time much as was Richard Adams with the rabbits in “Watership Down.” One knows that they weren’t really like that, but they must have been something like it. — Ken Strongman.