Book Review

By Derryll White

Susan  Hill (2005). The Various Haunts of Men.

Susan Hill was already an accomplished writer with many books, including ‘The Woman In Black’ and ‘The Service of Clouds,’ to her credit when she wrote this. ‘The Various Haunts of Men’ is the first in what she planned as a series of mystery novels featuring British Inspector Simon Serrailler.

Susan Hill is an erudite and moral writer. Although this is a thick book she does things with economy. “There are few things more despicable than stealing money.” – terse, clear, and to the point. She is the same in the development of her characters. “I needed secrets, things that were mine only and never yours.”  I really appreciate such brevity, much the same as finding a quarter in the street.  I stop, pick it up, briefly think how fortunate I am. That is the way Hill’s succinct phrases hit me as I read.

As well, Susan Hill has a very well-developed social conscience and she lets her characters speak clearly.  Anyone who has had time up close and personal with our own Interior Health Authority  will hear the statements of Dr. Kat Deerborn.  Like some of our own best doctors, she is there for the patient and family no matter what the grey bureaucrats decree to the contrary. As well, everyone who has lost a loved one will pause and remember as Susan Hill writes about “all the dreary necessary business that attends on death.” She is so graceful that she massages my own losses in ways no pricey grief counseling textbook can.

Family, professionalism, spirituality and community are all clear foundations in this work of fiction. A strange mix some might think in a mystery novel. But Hill breaks all the moulds, moves boldly out into the real world of sensitive, honest people mixed with real-life ugly happenings. She is not afraid to expose herself in her characters, to speak to perceived injustices and government neglect, to recognize the harsh ways that society sometimes uses even the gentlest of people. One can sense immediately that there will be more DCI Simon Serrailler novels.

As bold as she is, there is another soft and sensitive side to Susan Hill. She builds her characters slowly, thoroughly, with complexity and care. She gives them the surety and communion of the small British cathedral town of Lafferton. It is pastoral in description, comfortable in the neighbourliness she creates, and thus even more gripping when the disappearances occur.

I said Susan Hill was a fine, bold writer – in fact so bold she is sometimes shocking. She goes to great lengths to create a character in this novel that exhibits every possibility of going the distance, of being an intricate part of DCI Simon Serrailler novels to come.  And then she kills that character off.  I was shocked!  I am not going to reveal any more except to say I was taken aback by the act.  That sense of incredulity does not often happen for me in novels – in life, yes, but not in works of fiction.

This is a powerful, evocative novel. Susan Hill writes with grace, curiosity and an unbending intent to know the hearts and minds of the people of Britain with whom she shares the known world. And she pushes hard into faith and the unknown.  My sense is that this will be a stellar series, and that over the coming years I will read all of it.

*******

Excerpts from the novel

MEDICINE: Spending some time now with a dying patient – doing something so ordinary as making tea in this kitchen, helping an ordinary couple through the most momentous and distressing parting of all – put the hassle and increasing administrative burden of general practice in its place.  Medicine was changing, or being changed, by the grey men who managed but did not understand it.

HEALING: “I still miss him, I do still think of him a lot of the time.”

“We have to move forward.  Our loved ones don’t want us to try and live in the past.  But they’re never far away.”

She’d felt better then.

ENGLISH WORLD: The garden was well tended, with a rockery down which a small waterfall ran into a pool.  A contented life, Freya thought, the old-fashioned life still lived by so many people up and down the country in ordinary places…. home cooking, gardening, neighbourliness, shopping, a day’s outing on a coach to a stately home, perhaps bingo occasionally, and otherwise evenings with the television and books from the library.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org

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