REVIEWS of Masks & Shadows
NZ Listener
More Murder Vicar?
"You think...
that when I'm preaching I'm putting on some sort of religious mask
that's not really me?" Alex Hanson is the Anglican vicar of St John's
Church in Stoke Newington, England. Is he also a murderer? Michael
Riddell's new novel concerns a child abduction, rape and murder. It's
not so much a crime mystery thriller, though, as a God mystery
thriller. Masks and Shadows is that rare creature, an intelligent
modern Christian novel. A horror story woven out of tabloid headlines,
its description of human suffering is a kind of lure, a test-case
questioning the absence of an interventionist God.
A much-travelled man who has lectured in theology and worked in the church, Riddell has developed a dark-adapted eye, as if he has spent a long time staring into the human soul. His book is the subversive novel of a faded flower child at odds with institutional authority. It contains a critique of contemporary competitive Christianity, of the false unction of smooth sermonisers. It examines the middle-class clergy and finds them wanting. The modern clergyman is merely a "dealer in the commodity of sin. He needs to know his product."
Crime and punishment are at the heart of the book, only now the struggle between good and evil resonates with theories of criminology, sociology and therapy. Violence, in the form of pathological male aggression, generates a shock wave. When the body of Tessa, the murdered child, is discovered, her anguished parents react with their own violence. Her mother rips up a Bible and sets fire to it; her father picks a fight with a stranger over a parking space. In this book the struggle is between the old message of God's love and today's ubiquitous, abrasive irony and nihilism.
Offering hope for embattled believers, Masks and Shadows risks turning into a moral tract, though an entertaining one. It is saved from being a leaden-footed trudge through a bleak terrain, partly by the fast and furious juggling with literary techniques and partly by the supercharged appeal to the emotions that the author conjures up. He tries on different narrative voices. At one point we are presented with the pathos of Tessa's last moments of consciousness; at another, the killer is justifying his behaviour in an interior monologue. Jumping back and forward in time, the book blurs boundaries and challenges expectations.
A prison inmate becomes an unlikely hero by displaying a consistent humanity, but can we believe him when he says that he has been jailed because of the English class system? And when the clergyman looks in the mirror, does he see a smiling representative of the Christian godhead still in denial - or a soul in torment?
Dostoevsky-like, Riddell is less interested in the answers than in pondering the questions. The implication at the end is that, although the little girl rises to heaven, her killer is condemned to hell on earth. A novel, then, of vengeance and revenge, of common and garden psychopathology, of crime and the criminal mind.
David Eggleton, NZ Listener
A much-travelled man who has lectured in theology and worked in the church, Riddell has developed a dark-adapted eye, as if he has spent a long time staring into the human soul. His book is the subversive novel of a faded flower child at odds with institutional authority. It contains a critique of contemporary competitive Christianity, of the false unction of smooth sermonisers. It examines the middle-class clergy and finds them wanting. The modern clergyman is merely a "dealer in the commodity of sin. He needs to know his product."
Crime and punishment are at the heart of the book, only now the struggle between good and evil resonates with theories of criminology, sociology and therapy. Violence, in the form of pathological male aggression, generates a shock wave. When the body of Tessa, the murdered child, is discovered, her anguished parents react with their own violence. Her mother rips up a Bible and sets fire to it; her father picks a fight with a stranger over a parking space. In this book the struggle is between the old message of God's love and today's ubiquitous, abrasive irony and nihilism.
Offering hope for embattled believers, Masks and Shadows risks turning into a moral tract, though an entertaining one. It is saved from being a leaden-footed trudge through a bleak terrain, partly by the fast and furious juggling with literary techniques and partly by the supercharged appeal to the emotions that the author conjures up. He tries on different narrative voices. At one point we are presented with the pathos of Tessa's last moments of consciousness; at another, the killer is justifying his behaviour in an interior monologue. Jumping back and forward in time, the book blurs boundaries and challenges expectations.
A prison inmate becomes an unlikely hero by displaying a consistent humanity, but can we believe him when he says that he has been jailed because of the English class system? And when the clergyman looks in the mirror, does he see a smiling representative of the Christian godhead still in denial - or a soul in torment?
Dostoevsky-like, Riddell is less interested in the answers than in pondering the questions. The implication at the end is that, although the little girl rises to heaven, her killer is condemned to hell on earth. A novel, then, of vengeance and revenge, of common and garden psychopathology, of crime and the criminal mind.
David Eggleton, NZ Listener
Sunday Star Times
Masks & Shadows
The mysteries of good and evil are at the heart of Dunedin-based writer Mike Riddell's powerful new novel. When a young girl is raped and murdered in the London suburb of Stoke Newington, suspicion falls on the local Anglican vicar, Alex Hanson.
Married with two teenage children, admired by his congregation for his pulpit eloquence, Alex has hitherto seemed a model of piety. A touch of priggishness - hardly unusual in a vicar - is his only obvious failing. But does a monster lurk behind the facade?
Riddell's narrative moves from first person to third and shifts back and forward in time, depicting events before, after and - finally - during the murder. We're taken inside the minds of both the victim and her killer. When the murderer first addresses us, we're not sure who's speaking. The connections between various sets of characters isn't immediately apparent either. But that's a deliberate strategy. By the end of the book the pattern has become clear.
A minister of religion himself for nine years (though Baptist, not Anglican), Riddell impresses with the breadth of his sympathy. He gets the voice of little Tessa, the murdered child, just right. She's a delightfully inquisitive and fun-loving child without being too cute (though I would have trimmed some of her beyond-the-grave commentary). It's because we like her so much that her violation packs such a wallop.
Riddell also convinces with his portrayal of how the child's death destroys her parents' marriage. The mother's rage and gradual slide into alcoholism is almost unbearable in its realism. The prison scenes are likewise authentic - and definitely not for the squeamish. As a contrast with Alex, we have Joe the long-term convict, a hard man who accepts violence as part of his code of conduct, yet nevertheless shows the most genuine loyalty and compassion in the book.
Masks & Shadows is a harrowing read, but deeply rewarding.
Iain Sharp, Sunday Star Times
Masks & Shadows
The mysteries of good and evil are at the heart of Dunedin-based writer Mike Riddell's powerful new novel. When a young girl is raped and murdered in the London suburb of Stoke Newington, suspicion falls on the local Anglican vicar, Alex Hanson.
Married with two teenage children, admired by his congregation for his pulpit eloquence, Alex has hitherto seemed a model of piety. A touch of priggishness - hardly unusual in a vicar - is his only obvious failing. But does a monster lurk behind the facade?
Riddell's narrative moves from first person to third and shifts back and forward in time, depicting events before, after and - finally - during the murder. We're taken inside the minds of both the victim and her killer. When the murderer first addresses us, we're not sure who's speaking. The connections between various sets of characters isn't immediately apparent either. But that's a deliberate strategy. By the end of the book the pattern has become clear.
A minister of religion himself for nine years (though Baptist, not Anglican), Riddell impresses with the breadth of his sympathy. He gets the voice of little Tessa, the murdered child, just right. She's a delightfully inquisitive and fun-loving child without being too cute (though I would have trimmed some of her beyond-the-grave commentary). It's because we like her so much that her violation packs such a wallop.
Riddell also convinces with his portrayal of how the child's death destroys her parents' marriage. The mother's rage and gradual slide into alcoholism is almost unbearable in its realism. The prison scenes are likewise authentic - and definitely not for the squeamish. As a contrast with Alex, we have Joe the long-term convict, a hard man who accepts violence as part of his code of conduct, yet nevertheless shows the most genuine loyalty and compassion in the book.
Masks & Shadows is a harrowing read, but deeply rewarding.
Iain Sharp, Sunday Star Times