koilungfish | The Chalice by Phil Rickman

Title - The Chalice
Author - Phil Rickman
ISBN - 0-330-34267-3

"The cover, dated August 1976, featured a pen-and-ink drawing of a mane-haired woman in see-through robes and a headdress of bound twigs. Both arms were uplifted, along with her nipples, towards a sunrise behind the Tor. It made Juanita, who'd posed for the drawing, instantly depressed."

I don't like giving up on books. No matter how bad, I'll try to finish it - indeed, some people have observed that my inability to leave things unfinished runs so deep it's almost a neurosis - so it says a lot about The Chalice that I've been unable to finish it twice. The first time I picked The Chalice up was in a school library when I was about fourteen; I gave up because I was rather uncomfortable with one of the characters having a large swastika tattoo.

Recently I found a copy of The Chalice in a second-hand bookshop and, since I've enjoyed, or at least appreciated, Mr Rickman's pre-Merrily Watkins books more as I've gotten older, I decided to give it another chance. Oddly enough, I failed to finish once again.

Mr Rickman has a basic formula for his books: the setting is a small, somewhat rural town in a somewhat economically-depressed local such as his home, the Welsh borders; the cast are mundane yet eclectic in a manner that makes them deeply human; the plot involves something ephemerally supernatural with a strong pagan slant; the themes of light versus dark and pagan versus Christian will underpin the book; the message will be one of tolerance and balance. The whole thing usually works: I'm very fond of The Man In The Moss, which I consider to be a superior supernatural if not horror story, and Crybbe is also a very strong story. Candlenight, Mr Rickman's first outing, was a harder, bleaker thing, and also shorter; Mr Rickman now works the doorstop format. December I've never run across, having something of an aversion to books that involve real celebrities, even dead ones like John Lennon. The Wine Of Angels I recall as being quite a good book, but its sequel, A Crown of Lights, disappointed me with a lack of the supernatural, and that Mr Rickman chose to stick with Merrily Watkins rather that moving on to new characters left me disinteresting.

The reason A Crown of Lights disappointed me is, in part, the same reason The Chalice caused me to wander off halfway through: it's too mundane, both in terms of the supernatural and in terms of the plot. The Chalice opens very strongly, with the first few chapters covering a pagan ritual on Glastonbury Tor that almost turns into a sacrificial murder. Mr Rickman shows what I should have recognised as the beginning of a lack of bite here. The scenes concerning the ritual all end with something very exciting about to happen. The next scene opens with those in danger now safely away, and then flashes back to tell the reader what happened. This makes for a sequence of cliffhangers and disappointments that ultimately becomes annoying.

The action then tapers off for the next half of the book. Yes, the entire next half of the book offers only one scene with a ghost bus to keep the reader interested. If one starts a book with a damn-near ritual murder, one has to keep things alive. Mr Rickman does not. The entire first half of the book is about establishing Mr Rickman's usually strong, human characters. In this case the characters are pretty much fine - Jim Battle and Juantia Carey come across as good characters who can carry the story to its conclusion - but this goes on too long. Even the most interesting characters get dull what all they do is discuss meetings about a plan for a relief road.

Yes, The Chalice goes from pagan ritual sacrifice to town meetings about a planned relief road.

Relief roads are not interesting. It is up to Mr Rickman to convince his readers that this relief road is exciting and dangerous. He does not. Here his characters fail him. He has constructed a cast meant to represent Glastonbury's inhabitants: moneyed gentry Archer Ffitch, intolerant local farmer Dan Moulder, ex-hippy bookstore owner Juanita Carey, older ex-hippy painter Jim Battle, New Age flake Diane Ffitch, and author Joe Powys who was one of the main characters in Crybbe. The supporting cast include fluffy pagan and local councillor Wooly, a mad pagan hag called Ceridwyn, Dan Moulder's son Sam who appears to be Diane Ffitch's love interest, a woman called Verity whose exact job is a bit unclear, Juanita's ex-lover whose role is entirely that of a plot convenience and a very flakey pagan traveller called Headlice.

One of the reasons I like Mr Rickman's books is because he does not have Mr Clean White America, or even Mr Clean White Britain, front and centre of his stories. He gives us older characters, non-mainstream characters, who are yet human and realistically strong. This is usually good. The characters from Crybbe were convincingly human and convincingly involved in the supernatural craziness. The characters from The Man In The Moss were likewise. The characters in The Chalice are just convincingly human. Perhaps the problem is that Mr Rickman generally constructs his books around a strong female lead, a woman who already has plenty of life experience. Juanita Carey fits the mould, although her internal monologue becomes rather monotonous as she keeps worrying about how she's getting old. She's active, engaged in events, and yet ... nothing happens. For half the book.

Mr Rickman has rather painted himself into the corner here in that, in creating a cast that represents the many aspects of Glastonbury, he's cut down the list of characters that the readers can sympathise with. The "townie" side - Dan Moulder, Archer Ffitch, Oliver Pixhill - come across as one bigot and two slimeball suits, the latter only interested in money. They're clearly cut as the "bad buys", in as much as Mr Rickman deals in such absolutes. The other side is divided into the older hippie community, represented by Wooly, Battle and Carey, and the newer pagan/new age community represented by Diane Ffitch, Headlice and an assemblage of very unpleasant travellers, the latter of whom are also unsympathetic. Wooly doesn't come off well, sounding strongly disconnected from reality. In the end the only people in the book who seem mostly sane are Carey and Sam Moulder, the latter of whom had barely appeared by the time I gave up.

The problem with The Chalice is twofold: too little happens in the first half of the book, and then two of the most sympathetic characters, Battle and Carey, get set on fire. Battle exits the book and Carey steps out of the plot for a while. This leaves the task of keeping the readers interested to Diane Ffitch, who I think Mr Rickman was trying to present as an interesting if screwed-up young woman. Unfortunately she comes across as a dippy flake with all the mental acumen of a stunned rabbit.

It is at this juncture I gave up. I had reached the point where I would pick up the book, read a scene, put it down with a mental groan, twiddle my thumbs for two minutes as my inability to leave anything unfinished prickled me, then rinse and repeat. Finally, after a week and fifty pages, I came to the conclusion that The Chalice wasn't worth finishing. The construction of this book is innately wrong. Mr Rickman's cast contains too few interesting, sympathetic characters to sustain the plot, or absence of it, in Carey's absence.

There is a rule of thumb in writing that states one should start as close to the action as possible. Mr Rickman looked like he was observing this by starting things off with a pagan ritual that looked like it was going to be a murder and then wimped out - and make no mistake, it does read like wimping out, more on the author's part than on the evil pagans' - and wimping out so strongly, indeed, that nothing happens for half the book. It's hard to explain how little is going on: there are meetings about a relief road; one of the feminist pagans goes a bit loopy and smashes some crockery; Diane Ffitch wanders around being a moon-faced weed; Jim Battle observes all this and thinks everyone's nuts, and I suspect most readers would gladly buy him a pint for being right. The main thrust of the action seems to be Carey and Diane Ffitch's intent to start a local alternative magazine, and the aforementioned planned relief road. This doesn't feel important. By contrast, the main thrust of the first half of Crybbe involved the restoration of a stone circle by an egomaniac millionare, with much upset amongst those whose land the stones or sites of the stones happened to be located on. The Man In The Moss had all sorts of shenanigans - theft, music, exploding deer skulls, preserved corpses, evangelist vicars - plenty to keep the reader interested. The Chalice has ... a planned relief road and a planned alternative newspaper. This is not very interesting.

The ghost bus was interesting but only got one scene. I'm sure that Mr Rickman planned to show that the unfriendly pagan ritual and Battle's fiery demise were linked to the rising of some wicked power, but he didn't need to narrate all the intervening months. Nothing happened. Mr Rickman does good supernatural happenings, yet for some reason refrains from doing them here. He also refrains from giving his characters much sexuality, something that his other books presented well. Perhaps there is a link - no ghosts, no sex, no energy.

In short, the first half of The Chalice is an inch of book that prevents the reader from ever finding out what the other inch of the book had to offer. It is flat-out dull. All Mr Rickman's good things are here - strong, human characters, a mature reflection on the differences between the pagan and the Christian, a rejection of simple divisions for a more balanced look at all sides - but they're by no means as good as they are in Crybbe or The Man In The Moss - and too long goes with too little happening.

Read Mr Rickman's books, by all means. Just not this book.

This book is:
* - too long with too little action
* - contained of good, realistically human characters
* - about how Glastonbury screws people up

This book is not:
* - interesting enough to finish
* - living up to its potential
* - Mr Rickman's best work