Ron's Reviews > The Devil's Novice

Updated from 2016:
“Suspicion drapes itself round him like cobwebs on the autumn bush.”

Another excellent excursion into medieval England. Ellis’ world building is worthy the best of fantasy—simultaneously delivering verisimilitude and a sense of other.

“Cadfael … had considerable sympathy with the ardent young, who overdo everything, and take wing at a line of verse of a snatch of music.”

This chronicle explores the matter of love. Not just romantic, but familial and patriotic. What might a man or woman do for someone (or some cause) they truly love. Die for it? Kill for it? Take the blame for another? For a change Ellis keeps the reader in the dark as long as our protagonist. Yet without Cadfael’s snooping, several grave injustices might have gone to the grave. Literally.

“I never knew a postulant to pursue his novitiate with so much passion, and so little joy.”

Moderns, of course, cannot imagine a young person willing exiting life to the discipline and rule of monastic orders. Yet the reader may identify with the motives of at least five of these characters.

“It’s high time that you remembered you have two sons. Will you let one of them die uncomforted?”

This story compares well with other historical fiction. In addition to the murder mystery, this tale brings to the reader an understanding of a historical setting which borders on the mythic, an introduction to a medieval craft (in this case, making charcoal), reflections on life then and now, a love story, and the fun of a tale well told.

“He’s innocent enough, God knows, to believe that other men are as honest as he.”

Cadfael series: “Ellis Peters” draws the reader into the twelfth century with modern story telling but holds us there with a richness of detail which evokes a time and place which might as well be fictional. Though the foreground of each chronicle is a murder mystery, behind it people and culture are woven in a wondrous tapestry. Readers seeking a story closer to fact than epic fantasy—where horses run forever, swords never dull, clerics invoke lightning bolts, all steeped in nihilism—should value Edith Pargeter’s series on the life and times of this erstwhile crusader and now monastic.