Fludd
From the double Man Booker prize-winning author of ‘Wolf Hall’, this is a dark fable of lost faith and awakening love amidst the moors.Fetherhoughton is a drab, dreary town somewhere in a magical, half-real 1950s north England, a preserve of ignorance and superstition protected against the advance of reason by its impenetrable moor-fogs. Father Angwin, the town’s cynical priest, has lost his faith, and wants nothing more than to be left alone. Sister Philomena strains against the monotony of convent life and the pettiness of her fellow nuns. The rest of the town goes about their lives in a haze, a never-ending procession of grim, grey days stretching ahead of them.Yet all of that is about to change. A strange visitor appears one stormy night, bringing with him the hint, the taste of something entirely new, something unknown. But who is Fludd? An angel come to shake the Fetherhoughtonians from their stupor, to reawaken Father Angwin’s faith, to show Philomena the nature of love? Or is he the devil himself, a shadowy wanderer of the darkest places in the human heart?Full of dry wit, compassionate characterisations and cutting insight, Fludd is a brilliant gem of a book, and one of Hilary Mantel’s most original works.
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Fludd
Hilary Mantel
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
This edition published by Fourth Estate 2010
FIRST EDITION
First published by Viking 1989
Published in paperback by Harper Perennial 2005
Copyright © Hilary Mantel 1989
PS section copyright © Sarah O’Reilly 2010
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Hilary Mantel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is a work of fiction.
The characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination.
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Source ISBN: 9780007172894
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN 9780007354931 Version: 2018-07-31
For Anne Ostrowska
The Church in this story bears some but not much resemblance to the Roman Catholic Church in the real world, c. 1956. The village of Fetherhoughton is not to be found on a map.
The real Fludd (1574–1637) was a physician, scholar and alchemist. In alchemy, everything has a literal and factual description, and in addition a description that is symbolic and fantastical.
You are familiar, no doubt, with Sebastiano del Piombo’s huge painting The Raising of Lazarus, which hangs in the National Gallery in London, having been purchased in the last century from the Angerstein collection. Against a background of water, arched bridges and a hot blue sky, a crowd of people – presumably the neighbours – cluster about the risen man. Lazarus has turned rather yellow in death, but he is a muscular, well-set-up type. His grave-clothes are draped like a towel over his head, and people lean towards him solicitously, and seem to confer; what he most resembles is a boxer in his corner. The expressions of those around are puzzled, mildly censorious. Here – in the very act of extricating his right leg from a knot of the shroud – one feels his troubles are about to begin again. A woman – Mary, or maybe Martha – is whispering behind her hand. Christ points to the revenant, and holds up his other hand, fingers outstretched: so many rounds down, five to go.
Table of Contents
On Wednesday the bishop came in person. He was a modern prelate, brisk and plump in his rimless glasses, and he liked nothing better than to tear around the diocese in his big black car.
He had taken the precaution – advisable in the circumstances – of announcing himself two hours before his arrival. The telephone bell, ringing in the hall of the parish priest’s house, had in itself a muted ecclesiastical tone. Miss Dempsey heard it as she was coming from the kitchen. She stood looking at the telephone for a moment, and then approached it gingerly, walking on the balls of her feet. She lifted the receiver as if it were hot. Her head on one side, holding the earpiece well away from her cheek, she listened to the message given by the bishop’s secretary. ‘Yes My Lord,’ she murmured, though in retrospect she knew that the secretary did not merit this. ‘The bishop and his sycophants’, Father Angwin always said; Miss Dempsey supposed they were a kind of deacon. Holding the receiver in her fingertips, she replaced it with great care. She stood in the dim passageway, for a moment, thinking, and bowed her head momentarily, as if she had heard the Holy Name of Jesus. Then she went to the foot of the stairs and bellowed up them: ‘Father Angwin, Father Angwin, get yourself up and dressed, the bishop will be upon us before eleven o’clock.’
