This book is set in a bleak remote moorland village in Derbyshire in which the population is of a predominantly Catholic-type religion in the mid 1950s. The first characters that the reader meets are Father Angwin and his housekeeper, Miss Dempsey. Father Angwin is a Catholic priest (or similar) who has lost his belief in God. As well as a church and a school the village has a convent which is ruled over by Mother Perpetua who metes out physical punishment at will to the sisters who reside inside. The local Bishop has ordered Father Angwin to remove some of the statues in the church so the Father decides to bury them in the churchyard. The Bishop has also said that he will send a curate to Father Angwin to help him out in his time of indecision. In the meantime a stranger arrives at Father Angwin's front door in the middle of the night and gives his name as Fludd. Father Angwin assumes that he is the curate but the reader knows that he is not. The main theme of the novella is the difference between appearance and reality and the reader begins to suspect that Fludd is either an angel or a devil. Another character in the story is Sister Philomena who lives under Sister Perpetua's tyrannical rule and who undergoes a transformation in the book.
The writing is elegant, concise and unexpected.
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