Joslin de Lay is a young minstrel who, following his father’s
death, travels from his native France to England. Prior to his death, his
father urged him to travel to Wales on a personal quest (the “long journey” of
the series title). Joslin’s ship, however, docks in Eastern England, leaving
him with a long way still to go. Making his way inland, Joslin takes refuge in
an abandoned plague village near the small town of Stovenham, which makes him
an easy target for the superstitious horror of the townsfolk – that, and the
fact that he is a Frenchman, and therefore from a country at war with England.
Unsurprisingly, when a series of murders begin in the town
Joslin soon finds himself being cast as the prime suspect. Finding the murderer
becomes a matter of urgency, and not simply in order for Joslin to clear his
name – he soon realises that he may be the next victim. The tension builds
steadily, relentlessly, as Joslin and his allies find themselves pitted against
an assassin who “works unseen and invisible ... Truly like the serpent at noonday.”
Hamley brings his characters to life beautifully, presenting
them as people not, in essence, so very different to us, however unfamiliar
their society and culture. They speak in modern English – a good stylistic
choice, making their speech not just easy to follow for the modern reader but a
vital, living language. (As Hamley points out in the Afterword, the characters
would have been speaking modern English by their own lights.) There is a
parallel with our own time, too: this is a society where people, enervated by
war and sickness, are questioning the system and the ties of tradition. “There’s
two laws in the world,” says one character, “God’s and the King’s ... and
people are as deserving, whether king or churl.”
A fast-paced mediaeval thriller, Of Dooms and Death is both an immensely satisfying read in its own
right, and a captivating introduction to the Joslin de Lay series.
There was something in
the air; something indefinable; something fearful. Both felt it; neither said
anything about it. But they were both watchful.
The stories in Hamley’s collection Out of the Deep are supernatural tales just as I like them: subtle,
light on out-and-out horror, but full of psychological insight. These stories
have a variety of settings, from a monastery to a football pitch, and a variety
of characters, from a vulnerable schoolgirl to a bare-knuckle prizefighter;
what they all share is an insight into human behaviour and common human
situations.
The story Hear my
Voice has a mediaeval flavour, as both a monk in the Middle Ages and a
modern schoolboy are attacked by the same malign entity. Naturally, their
interpretations of this entity differ: to the monk it is of the Devil, while
the schoolboy interprets it in altogether more worldly terms. Hear my Voice is about the power of
music and the joy, and perhaps the dangers, of creativity; both monk and
schoolboy are artists who unwittingly become channels for something altogether more
dangerous:
He remembered the
great ones of the past: Mozart and Schubert, dead in their prime; Beethoven so
deaf he never heard his greatest work. And what about John Keats? ... Yes, he
knew what had happened to Colin Chiltern. And perhaps it had to.
From this despair, however, comes a new surge of hope:
Inside his mind the
noise changed. The old harmonies did not return. But out of the cacophony there
came, dimly at first but steadily stronger, a deeper, stranger music than he
had ever heard before. He did not understand it; was not sure if he could
handle it. But his pace quickened and soon he broke into a run, to lose no time
in trying to capture it forever.
The stories in this collection are all supernatural in
nature, often (though not exclusively) dealing with the theme of ghosts.
Ironically, ghosts – not generally judged to be “real” – can sometimes
illustrate the reality of a given situation, and this is certainly the case in Out of the Deep. The ghost, existing in
that queasy no man’s land between body and spirit, and truth and fiction, can
nevertheless act as a kind of interpreter insofar as human hopes, fears and
longings are concerned. For example, in The
Overbalancing Man the ghost is representative not just of an oncoming
danger, but of the power of both love and grief.
While it is the ghost who is traditionally seen as “trapped”,
many of the living characters in these stories seem equally confined – by parents,
guilt, or isolation. In Incident on the
Atlantic Coast Express the protagonist is captive not just to his mother,
but to the weight of their joint histories. In Early Three Mornings, a young woman is constrained and “haunted” by
a traumatic incident in her past. In Time
Trial entrapment is born of guilt and lost love.
Yet all these stories offer us hope. Ghosts, whether real or
imagined, whether benign or malignant, can be exorcised. In Time Trial a guilt-ridden man is freed
when he saves someone else’s life – and in the process, you suspect, his own.
In The Shirt Off a Hanged Man’s Back
a being trapped by guilt and a sense of injustice, desperate to share his story
– “In all time stretched out before me, who will hear me?” – is set free by
forgiveness, as is the one who forgives.
Many of the stories in Out
of the Deep were written, I believe, for older children or young adults.
However, anyone of any age could enjoy them. Like all good supernatural and
ghost stories, they are ultimately about human life, in all its splendour and
squalor. And for those who enjoy pulling the curtain aside and seeing some of
the mechanics of the writing process, Hamley adds a postscript to each story, explaining
where the original idea came from, and how the story came to be written – an added
bonus for anyone who enjoys peering behind the scenes.
To buy Of Dooms and Death go to Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. Out of the Deep can be bought here: Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
