Ritual (1967)

Ritual (1967)

Author: David Pinner  |  Page Count: 224

'Five apple trees stapled their leaves on the sky cloth. And one pear tree, without a single pear, shouldered arms and saluted the sun.'

Horrific things are afoot in the Cornish village of Thorn. Or mayhaps it just appears that way to an outsider? Whatever the case, for English police officer David Hanlin the mystery surrounding the dead girl that initially drew him to Thorn is something that he's determined to figure out, for reasons other than simple job description.

The villagers dislike and take exception to Hanlin's questioning. His religious beliefs aren't theirs. He's Christian. They worship something older. Their unwillingness to help with enquiries seems evasive, which makes Hanlin suspect them all the more.

David Pinner's opening chapter is excellent. The way he moves from one focal point to another is something not seen often in written form, it's more of a visual (film) technique, but it works - it successfully sets the tone, establishes the novel's setting and pulls us directly into the drama.

As mentioned already, a young girl is dead. The circumstances seem straightforward enough, but there are a number of unasked questions that, once given voice, might shed a different light on things. For Hanlin those questions are directing his every movement, itching his conscience and guiding him toward a revelation that he might regret finding but will nonetheless seek out.

The second chapter is more evenly paced, with due attention given to all that we need to know at that stage. With it being primarily from Hanlin's perspective, his beliefs and fears influence our own. He's new in town and so are we; our understanding of the village and its ways are shared.

Pinner favours metaphors over similes; they sometimes miss their target completely and draw the wrong kind of attention upon themselves, but when they work they're fantastic. His writing can be dynamic and even when exaggerated is exciting to read, not seeming overly decorated or dressed up. But there are times when the opposite is true. Some passages are over-worked and stand out as failings that could easily have been remedied if he chose to do so. That he didn't suggests he was happy with them, and the problem may well be with my wanting it to be more consistently even. The contrasts may have had more literary significance than I was aware of.

Something I was aware of was the novel's influence, namely that it was the inspiration behind Robin Harldy's The Wicker Man (1973) film. The similarities are plain to see to anyone who's viewed the film or read the later novelisation (1978), but there are enough differences to make Ritual its own thing, and therefore just as unpredictable as the more well-known film.

NOTE: if you're a kindle owner and decide to go that route, be aware that the frequency of spelling errors in amazon's version would give a statistician a hard-on. In the first chapter alone they manage to twice spell a character's name wrong, and it doesn't get any better from there.