Sherry Chandler

Reginald Hill’s new novel

The Stranger House is the new novel from the British mystery novelist, Reginald Hill, who is one of the best mainstream writers in the English-speaking world. Without his signature characters Dalziel and Pascoe, the novel presents the same themes which have dominated his novels since A Clubbable Woman and Fell of Dark. It also features the police superintendent from the latter novel, retired and searching for answers to his own failed relationship–the motive for his professional success.

Loyalty and betrayal are central to the necessary questions omnipresent in Mr. Hill’s novels. There is always a tension between fealty to one’s family–a wife, child, a dodgy friend–and fealty to broader society–a priest to his church, a cop to the Strength, a spy to his country or agency. In this novel two young people come back to a small village in “Cumbria” [a recent geographical construct the British Government created several decades ago out of the Lake Country, Northumbria and bits of Yorkshire]. They are searching for their ancestors and those ancestors’ experiences in that small spot of England.

All Samantha Flood knows of her grandmother was that she was sent to Australia in the early 1960s by the Catholic church during the forced child relocation program–not the least of that organization’s abuses of power– pregnant at age 11. All the girl had to identify her was a small piece of paper with “Sam Flood, Illthwaite,” written thereon. In accord with the Laws of Fiction, she died in childbirth.

Miguel Madero, erstwhile priest-trainee, comes to Illthwaite looking for his ancestor, a Catholic winemaker’s son caught up in the adventure of the great Armada, sheltered for a time by the dominant family in the county and then possibly betrayed to Elizaberth’s heresy squad and tortured to death.

There are plenty of opportunities to explore misinterpretations of history, unjust [and just] prejudices for a variety of religions [including Nordic myth] and mistaken attempts to protect the interests of Family. The Stranger House is as strangely and wonderfully constructed as Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale.

Samantha is a mathematical prodigy and Miguel is infused with the metaphysical. So are they ineluctiby made for each other as they argue and squabble in their search for the truth. It all comes down to a question of family loyalties, which inform the best and the worst of all of the characters’ actions.

The Stranger House resembles The Wood Beyond and Pictures of Perfection most closely among the earlier novels. Illthwaite is a sort of dark reflection of Enscombe, and not to the detriment of the former. Mystical bonds between an abused ancestor and a descendent are central to Wood where Peter Pascoe relives the terror of his executed namesake and learns the truth about his family ties to local gentry. But Mr. Hill’s novels transcend genre and this is another wonderful addition to British literature.

Possibly related posts:

Reginald Hill & Claudia Emerson

A house on Wheeler Hill

The Death of Dalziel [aka Death Comes for the Fat Man]

November

Abandoned to the tender mercies of….

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