This is Hilary Mantel's fourth novel; it was published in 1989.

I opted for the audio-version, which was very impressively narrated by Gordon Griffin.

Reason for reading? Well, it's Mantel, and I increasingly feel that I'd read anything she wrote.

Also, the fictitious village in which Fludd is set (in 1956) is clearly based on Hadfield, where Mantel (1952-2022) grew up. Fetherhoughton has its counterpart, Netherhoughton, just as Hadfield has Padfield: "It is a liminal place on the borders of what is now Greater Manchester; a place of mists and rain, of freezing cold, of decaying industries, and of a profound conservatism."

In her 2003 memoir, Mantel says she grew up in "a place of complex geology and inventive forms of human deprivation, of inhospitable uplands and steep-sided valleys. Tiny fields, bordered by drystone walls, lie like a worn blanket on a pauper: sharp angles of limestone protrude like bony spurs through a token covering of green..."


The hills round Hadfield

Early in the piece, we meet Father Angwin, who is in charge of St Thomas Aquinas, Fetherhoughton's Catholic church, as well as his dour housekeeper, Miss Agnes Dempsey, who is in charge of Father Angwin. This old-fashioned cleric (who lost his faith many years ago, we later learn) is at odds with his bishop, not over this lack-of-faith thing, but because the church is full of statues, which the bishop thinks are idolatrous and anachronistic, and wants rid of. The bish is also threatening Father Angwin with a modernizing curate, so when Father Fludd rolls up on a dark rainy night, it is taken for granted that he's the one who has been appointed.

In an interview in 2015, Mantel confirmed Fetherhoughton's "close geographical match" with Hadfield, and also gives us clues to the story's origin (truth always being stranger than fiction): "When I was four years old, the bishop of the diocese ordered the statues removed from the church, thus becoming a local hate figure. Earlier than this (my mother tells me) there had been a very popular young priest who disappeared overnight. So you might say I’ve amalgamated two parish legends. I remember that my mother was planning to offer a home to St. Gerard Majella, who stood six foot and was black all over, and is credited with offering special aid to women in childbirth. I heard adults talking, in the air above my head. One said 'What are they going to do with the statues?' The other said 'Bury them.' A horrible shudder went through my infant frame. I know what I heard, but I don’t think they did bury them, and St. Gerard never did come to live with us. It’s a mystery really..."

***

This novel works really well on at least three levels.

Firstly, it's a wonderful picture of 1950s Derbyshire. And I must admit many of the descriptions reminded me a bit of my own childhood a decade later: Women in pinnies; children tugging their collars when they saw an ambulance; the dreaded "equipment" in the school gym (we called it "apparatus"); bunny hops (about the only gym manoeuvre I could execute); the slippers we all got once a year... At one point, Mantel says: "There was a spirit abroad in the village that discriminated so thoroughly against pretension that it also discriminated against ambition, even against literacy." Yes, that also has a certain familiarity...

I was curious about the way the Fetherhoughtonians turned their backs to the moors that surrounded them: "[They] did not look at the landscape at all. They were not Emily Bronte, nor were they paid to be... The moors were the vast cemetery of their imaginations."


The street where Mantel grew up

Secondly, Fludd is a terrific swipe at organized religion. Mantel was brought up a Roman Catholic, and although she abandoned her faith at the age of 12, she always felt she had been scarred by it. She explains: "You grow up believing you’re wrong and bad. For me, because I took what I was told really seriously, it bred a very intense habit of introspection and self-examination and a terrible severity with myself. So that nothing was ever good enough." Something else that sounds familiar...

So, as we follow Fludd on some of his familiarization rounds, we gain access to the convent. It's a cruel place. Mother Perpetua is a bigoted tyrant; daily life is utterly joyless; you need special dispensation even to wear a rainhat... No wonder sturdy, down-to-earth, inquisitive young Sister Philomena finds it intolerable.

The sending-up is done very humorously, however. For instance, when Fludd asks the nuns about the tapestry they're creating, we get this:

'What is the theme?'
'The plagues of Egypt,' said Sister Cyril. 'It is novel.'
'But edifying,' said Polycarp.
'It is an undertaking,' said Fludd, respectfully.
'We have done the plague of frogs,' Polycarp said. 'And the murrain, and the grievous swarm of flies.'
Sister Ignatius Loyola coughed a long hacking cough, then spoke for the first time: 'Now we are up to boils.'

This is so typical of Mantel's wonderfully deadpan satire.



Thirdly, Fludd-the-book is about alchemy...

Right at the beginning, an author's note tells us that the title character is inspired by a real person: A physician, scholar, and alchemist who died in 1637.

Our own Fludd is a mystery. People can never seem to recall his features (only his "corpse-like pallor"); he eats and drinks without ever seeming to consume anything; the ghostly noises that have troubled the presbytery strangely disappear on his arrival.

And he changes people... Father Angwin confides in him; Agnes casts aside her cares under his regard; Mother Perpetua breaks rules for him (and seems to find amusement in so doing...); and Sister Philomena, under his influence, not only starts to visualize a different kind of life, but also positively falls in love with him.

It's Philomena who guesses that Fludd is not a real curate... He tells her that his former trade involved "releasing spirit from matter", and freeing trapped souls. Philomena wonders whether he's the devil...

We're never entirely sure which realm he's from. (Father Angwin is convinced that the devil exists, but he thinks the fiend is manifest in Judd McEvoy, the local tobacconist. When Mother Perpetua experiences her -- non-lethal -- spontaneous combustion towards the end, both Fludd and Judd are possibly in the frame, but it's left ambiguous...)

Whether devil, angel, or simple alchemist, he gives Philomena good advice: "There are times in life when you must murder the past. Take a hatchet to what you used to be. Axe down the familiar world. It's hard, very painful, but it is better to do it than to keep the soul trapped in circumstances it can no longer abide. It may be that we had a way of life that used to satisfy us, but it does so no more; or a dream which has soured by long keeping, or a pleasure which has become habit. Outworn expectations, Sister, are a cage in which the soul rots away, like a mangy beast in a menagerie."



C. Neary gives us a very full account of the way the story reflects the phases of the alchemical process. Not only do we have two characters who typify the opposites that alchemy requires ("Fludd the fantastic, characterised by darkness, and Sister Philomena the literal, an embodiment of light") but we also have narrative tracks that illustrate the twin processes of nigredo (blackening) and albedo (whitening), thereby contributing to the "alchemical wedding" that forms the climax of the novel.

Fludd himself tells us what is meant here: "Base matter imprisons spirit, the gross fetters the subtle; every passion must be anatomized, every whim submit to mortar and pestle, every desire be ground and ground until its essence appears. After separation, drying out, moistening, dissolving, coagulating, fermenting, comes purification, recombination: the creation of substances that the world has until now never beheld... Everything that is going to be purified must first be corrupted; that is the principle of science and art. Everything that is to be put together must first be taken apart, everything that is to be made whole must first be broken into its component parts."

The mysterious process described in the book moves from the burying of the church statues to the "spark" between Fludd and Philomena, and then on to the exhumation of the statues (an event that causes physical changes in those who take part), and the union of Fludd and Philomena (which simultaneously allows the one-time nun, now Roisin again, to contemplate a new life outside the convent, while at the same time liberating many of the harmless characters from doubt or inhibition or whatever has been bothering them, and constraining some of the more aggressive ones, eg Mother Perpetua and the bishop, in various ways).

You're never quite sure whether you've caught all the layers (well, I wasn't), but you're drawn along regardless by the sheer exuberance of the story-telling. Ultimately, we all love a disruptor... And of course, at the end, Fludd vanishes, ready to pop up somewhere else where he's needed.



***

There's some debate as to whether this novel belongs in the magical realism and/or gothic categories. It doesn't really matter either way. It's entertaining, acerbic, and kind of inspiring (we all need a Fludd in our lives). And, according to John Mullan, it's the only Mantel novel with a happy ending...