Disordered Shelves : Rustication by Charles Palliser (2013)
If at eight o’clock you tell me you will not leave, you will have to be told something so shocking and horrible, that simply by hearing it, you will inflict irreparable harm on all three of us.
Charles Palliser’s historical thriller is presented as a journal discovered in a County Records Office. These are the private thoughts of seventeen year old Richard Shenstone, recently rusticated from Cambridge for what he claims to be a debt that he can’t repay. He has returned to his mother’s family home, an isolated house on the edge of a salt marsh - ‘truly the last place in England’. It is December, 1863, and there is some scandal Richard can’t quite fathom hanging over the family connected to his father’s death ; a will is being contested, leaving his mother penniless, so his sister Euphemia has to make a good match to rescue herself from a life of penury.
Richard’s journal records his cravings for opium - and his experiences of it - and in between his drug induced nocturnal ramblings he discovers the petty, sniping side of village society, where the local Rector’s wife determines social status by her control over the guest list of the county ball. But there are more sinister things happening in the village than power games - cattle and sheep are being mutilated, and obscene poison pen letters are being delivered to every household.
Rustication gripped me from start to finish - Richard may be an unreliable narrator, but is hard not to feel sympathy for a protagonist so far out of his depth. Charles Palliser has great fun with the journal format, interpolating the poison pen letters and transcribing Shenstone’s coded explicit sexual fantasies. I have no doubt that Rustication will be shortlisted for, and probably win, one of the CWA Daggers this year.
Charles Palliser’s historical thriller is presented as a journal discovered in a County Records Office. These are the private thoughts of seventeen year old Richard Shenstone, recently rusticated from Cambridge for what he claims to be a debt that he can’t repay. He has returned to his mother’s family home, an isolated house on the edge of a salt marsh - ‘truly the last place in England’. It is December, 1863, and there is some scandal Richard can’t quite fathom hanging over the family connected to his father’s death ; a will is being contested, leaving his mother penniless, so his sister Euphemia has to make a good match to rescue herself from a life of penury.
Richard’s journal records his cravings for opium - and his experiences of it - and in between his drug induced nocturnal ramblings he discovers the petty, sniping side of village society, where the local Rector’s wife determines social status by her control over the guest list of the county ball. But there are more sinister things happening in the village than power games - cattle and sheep are being mutilated, and obscene poison pen letters are being delivered to every household.
Rustication gripped me from start to finish - Richard may be an unreliable narrator, but is hard not to feel sympathy for a protagonist so far out of his depth. Charles Palliser has great fun with the journal format, interpolating the poison pen letters and transcribing Shenstone’s coded explicit sexual fantasies. I have no doubt that Rustication will be shortlisted for, and probably win, one of the CWA Daggers this year.