Phil Rickman, Charles Williams, and Powers of Evil

Phil Rickman, the British author, died on 29 October 2024 and the Phil Rickman Appreciation Group on Facebook suggested that people read his novel December during the month of December as a kind of memorial tribute to him.

I started rereading it. I first read it about 3 years ago, and found it a rather difficult read -- see my review here. This time I read it more slowly. It is a complex book, five parts with a Prologue and an Epilogue. Don't skip the Prologue! If you are reading it for the first or second time, I recommend re-reading the Prologue at the beginning of each part.

I first came across Phil Rickman when I was browsing in a bookshop in 1999. The title of a book, Crybbe intrigued me, so I took it off the shelf and read the blurb, which made him sound like a cross between Charles Williams and Stephen King, so I bought the book, and was not disappointed. 

I went on to read most of his novels, all the ones I could find, anyway. Somehow they didn't all seem to make their way into bookshops, or else they were sold out quickly. December was published only a month after Crybbe, but it was 20 years before I found it, in a secondhand book shop.

At one level, this is a ghost story. Charles Williams wrote one ghost story, All Hallows Eve, told from the point of view of one of the ghosts. December is told from several points of view, with so many switches that it is sometimes bewildering, but never from the point of view of the ghosts.

In this story five rock musicians have a contract to produce a record in a ruined abbey in south Wales. Four of the musicians are thought to be psychic, and the producers think that this, combined with the setting, should produce an interesting album that will sell well. The story begins with one of the musicians, Dave Reilly, being spooked by the sudden appearance of thirteen tallow candles in the studio and running out to take refuge under a tree. There he has a vision of dying outside a large building, and later the news comes over the radio that John Lennon was killed at that exact time, and he is haunted by the ghost of John Lennon. Three of the other members of the group are also haunted, each in different ways, and the group splits up. 

Fourteen years later they are called back together to complete production of the album, which had been abandoned, and they somewhat reluctantly agree. One of the members, Tom Storey, is approached through his wife's business partner, Martin Broadbank, who organises a dinner party for them to meet.  Broadbank's housekeeper cum concubine, Meryl, who is a spiritualist, and has a vision of most of the people at the dinner party suffering a violent death.

Later in the story Meryl finds herself in the company of Tom Storey, and tries to find out more about his psychic experiences, which, as a spiritualist, she sees as glamorous and exciting. But as events develop she comes to realise that she is out of her depth. She looks at herself in a mirror and

In the glass she sees not the old smouldering allure in the mysterious dark-eyed one who looks beyond the horizon, but plain perplexed apprehension in the unpainted eyes of an ordinary middle-aged woman.

And she longs to be back with Martin, for whom the only unknown forces are market forces. With whom she can safely be a believer in Other Spheres, a confidante of ghosts, and it doesn't matter because she's the only one, an exotic eccentric in a world of businessmen and socialites.

Meryl has been bound up with her perception of "unknown forces" as weird, mysterious, exotic and spooky, and perceives things like market forces as safe and ordinary and part of everyday life. Yet in the story the market forces are perhaps the most unsafe of all. It is market forces that are driving businessmen like Max Goff and Sile Copesake who in this story represent the money behind the music.

Also central to the story is the death of John Lennon, shot to death in New York City on 8 December 1980. But in December 2024, when so many Phil Rickman fans are reading his novel December, another businessman is shot in New York city. Some of this seems to have an uncanny application to Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare, alleged to have been shot by Luigi Mangione. As Max Goff and Sile Copesake are to music in December, so was Brian Thompson to health care in everyday life. And Max Goff also makes an appearance in Crybbe.

Phil Rickman hints at a theological point here. Meryl looks for the unknown spiritual forces in all the wrong places, when all along they are right under her nose, the market forces driving the behaviour of the guests at her dinner party.

Another theological point is evident in the case of Brian Thompson. Attacking the flesh and blood representative of spiritual forces is ineffective. Brian Thompson  was replaced in his office the very next day. As St Paul says:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic forces of wickedness in the heavenlies (Eph 6:10-12).

And he says elsewhere that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal. Flesh and blood oligarchs can be replaced. The real enemy is the spiritual power of the ideologies that drive them.

Recent reading: In the dark of the night

In the Dark of the Night by John Saul


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I was looking for a no-brain-strain novel to read before going to sleep, read the blurb on a few, and picked this one, and brought it home a couple of days ago.

It's a ghost story, sort of.

Three American high school boys are staying with their families in adjacent lakeside cottages for the summer. One family has rented an old house that has been unoccupied since the previous owner disaappeared a few years previously, in mysterious circumstances, but the reader already knows that he drowned in the lake trying to escape the voices in his head.

The boys discover a hidden room in an outbuilding with a lot of broken or dismantled objects, a table without a leg, a hacksaw without a blade, a doctor's bag without surgical implements, a lamp without a shade. There's an old ledger that shows that exorbitant prices were paid for some of these.

Then the boys start having identical nightmares of violence, in which one or all of them are involved. When some of the nightmares start coming true, they get scared, and think they myst keep away from the hidden room, but something keeps drawing them back.

It's an interesting plot idea, and at times I thought it might be a four star book, but in the end the author chickens out, and it degenerates into an unconvincing slasher story, a bit of an anticlimax after the build-up, and the symbolism of the objects isn't really made clear.

But still, wasn't looking for great literature when I bought it, just light bed-time reading.

The author is John Saul, who is apparently not the same as John Ralston Saul, another author whose books I have read.

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Recent reading: Her fearful symmetry

I finished this book more than a week ago, but have spent so much time trying to get my computer working properly again that I haven't had time to write about it until now.

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a difficult book to review; I suspect that many people, like me, will have been influenced by Audrey Niffenegger's first book, The time traveler's wife, and by the expectations aroused by that. Comparisons are inevitable. I certainly was influenced by such expectations, and found Her fearful symmetry a little disappointing.

It's a ghost story. It's about twin daughters of twins. It's set in Highgate Cemetery in North London. The cemetery is one of the characters in the book, as much so as any of the people. It's hard to say more than that without giving away the plot.

I found it an OK read, but I was expecting and hoping for more.


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