Here's proof that even an author you hold very closes to your heart can go off-piste. This is the 15th book I've read by Peter Ackroyd and you really do not know what you are going to get from him, especially with his fiction (of which this is his 19th). I do think he is more consistent writing non-fiction. His "House Of Doctor Dee" (1993) and highpoint "Dan Leno & The Limehouse Golem" (1994) were splendid novels, both of which I have re-read but he has left me cold before, with the critically acclaimed "Hawksmoor" (1985).
In a career spanning over 50 years and publishing into his 70s you can excuse the odd disappointment, which frankly, is what "Mr Cadmus" is.
It starts off well and the writing sparkles. In a North Devon village in the early 1980s three cottages stand in a row, the end two are occupied by cousins Millicent Sparrow and Maud Finch and into the middle one moves Mr Cadmus, an enigmatic Italian gentleman who easily befriends the two ladies. The early part of their developing association I found involving. The cousins have dark secrets hidden in their past and there's suggestions that Mr Cadmus is a force to be reckoned with. I thought we might be getting a darker take on EF Benson's "Mapp & Lucia" stories and I was quite happy with the prospect of that.
But the problem is that the narrative never settles, it goes off in unexpected and not always explicable directions which rather than enhance the reading process causes it to become bewildering. At 186 pages it rattles along at a nifty pace but half-way through when Cadmus favours one of the cousins over the other I felt myself getting lost and hunting for amethysts (the significance of which I never grasped) on Italian islands had me completely baffled as to where this was going and why.
I can appreciate a dark, twisted comedy which is how this was described but I'm not sure whether this is one, even though, especially in the early stages, there is humour in the writing. It feels like a stronger work is lurking within the pages especially with the elements of past and present crime but that potential seems to become increasingly dispensed with. There are elements of fable, magical realism, revenge tragedy and horror story but nothing meshes together well enough, too much is thrown at the reader at once and I just don't know what is going on with those amethysts……
I was pleased when I got to the end but I was none the wiser and for me that is dispiriting especially coming from an author who has appeared in my end of year Top 10s on 7 occasions. It is the most frustrating fiction I've read for some time, all it does is once again confirm my ambivalence towards novellas as a literary form.
Mr Cadmus was published in 2020 by Canongate Books.
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