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Hilary Mantel’s name has come to our notice with her best seller and winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize, Wolf Hall. She wrote Fludd some years before and it has just reappeared in a Fourth Estate edition.  It is a delightful little novel.

The setting is familiar to anyone who knows the bleak moorland area between Manchester and the mill area of the southern part of Yorkshire. Here, Hilary Mantel has created the villages of Fetherhoughton and Netherhoughton, inhabited by rough, tea-swilling, bedroom-slipper clad locals.

The Catholic priest and the local convent are the focus of much of the comic interplay. Sister Philomena, a young Irish nun earns our sympathy. She is an unwilling nun and a drudge in the convent.

Father Angwin is subjected to the whims of the modernising bishop and the story begins when he is obliged to remove most of the plaster saints from his church.

The arrival of Father Fludd in the community changes the way of life for these downtrodden souls. We, at first, believe that he is the promised curate sent by the bishop. “I have come to transform you,” he says.

As we are entertained by each comic turn in the story, we are slowly alerted to his real identity. Or are we?

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