Product Description

What happened to Lazarus after he was raised from the dead? Did he have a happy life? This is the kind of problem which besets Fludd, who impersonates a Roman Catholic priest, and it soon becomes clear to Father Angwin that this new assistant has strange powers and attributes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #375552 in Books
• Published on: 1990-07-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Customer Reviews

A bit of supernatural magic, perhaps
The doleful, English, mill town of Fetherhoughton is the stage for this short, delightful novel, FLUDD, by Hilary Mantel. There are four principal players. Father Angwin, pastor of the Roman Catholic church of St. Thomas Aquinas, has lost his belief in God's existence, but determinedly continues to serve his flock while suffering the oversight of his idiot diocesan bishop. Miss Dempsey, his spinster housekeeper, lives in terror of a small wart above her upper lip, thinking it a portent of cancer. Sister Philomena, a nun teaching in the parish school, is an Irish girl forced by her family into the convent, where she endures the petty tyranny of its Mother Superior. Then there's FLUDD, a curate ostensibly sent by the obnoxious bishop to help Angwin modernize his pastoral approach. Or is he? Once Fludd is in residence, people begin to, um, transform.

The engaging aspect of this story is that the reader never understands the nature of the being called Fludd, a mystery also grazing Angwin's perception during his first meal with Fludd, when the former observed:

"Whenever (he) looked up at (Fludd), it seemed that his whiskey glass was raised to his lips, but the level of what was in it did not seem to go down; and yet from time to time the young man reached out for the bottle, and topped himself up. It had been the same with their late dinner, there were three sausages on Father Fludd's plate, and he was always cutting into one or other, and spearing a bit on his fork; he was always chewing in an unobtrusive, polite way, with his mouth shut tight. And yet there were always three sausages on his plate, until at last, quite suddenly, there were none."

Is Fludd a man, or something else. He can tell fortunes by looking at the palm of one's hand. He alludes to having once been the practitioner of another profession that sounds a lot like alchemy. Odd talents for a Catholic priest. In any case, by the satisfying end of the tale, you, the reader, is left to decide for yourself - if you can.

a beautifully realised work by Mantel
I love Mantel. And can't believe her books aren't better known. Her work is complex, and unlike anyone else I have read, she seems to embody the skills and stories of four or five different authors. Her books cross continents and eras, her writing veering from brutally real to entirely magical. Fludd is the shortest and one of her most likeable reads. The Yorkshire town, the smell of a fusty 1950's school gym, the fear of the unknown, the superstition of Christianity and the allusion to alchemy are all intertwined and beautifully evoked in this gem of a book.

From the back cover...
TIME OUT: "Set in the fictitious village of Fetherhoughton, buried in the northern moorland,
Mantel's cleverly absorbing novel centres on the sheltered community's relationship with the
Church, which "bears some but not much resemblance to the Roman Catholic Church in the
real world, c.1956"

NEW STATESMAN & SOCIETY: "Then Fludd arrives. Fludd is a curate sent to assist Angwin - or is he? Loving beauty and language, sowing scandal and unrest in Fetherhoughton, might he not be the devil? Fludd is a quaint and lovely novel ... It doesn't only believe in miracles; it believes in happy endings."

SUNDAY TIMES: "The message of Hilary Mantel's excellent and ambitious novel is that the human form of this alchemy is perfectly possible; all one needs is love."

GUARDIAN: "In Fludd Hilary Mantel draws on her imagination, inventing a dark universe which
works to laws of her own making. The effect is dazzling, and establishes her in the front rank of novelists writing in English today."