"The Road to Grantchester" by James Runcie

I didn’t read the promotional blurb, so I saw the title The Road to Grantchester and assumed I was getting the new Sydney Chambers mystery by author, filmmaker, and playwright James Runcie. I was right on two of my three assumptions. It is a new Sydney Chambers story. It is written by Runcie, who’s published six previous Sydney Chambers mysteries. Where I erred was in the word “mystery.”

The Road to Grantchester is not a mystery. It is a prequel to the mystery series, and it has several of the characters who populate the mysteries. But it is an extraordinarily fine literary novel. I kept expecting a mystery to develop, and it never did, although there is a brief mystery that occurs and is solved by Chambers in one chapter, sufficient to prompt his friend and possible romantic interest Amanda Kendall to call him “Sherlock.” But it is only a slight taste, and the story settles quickly back into the novel it is.

The novel tells Chambers’ story, what his life was like before World War II, what happened during the war, how Chambers came to faith, and how he decided he was being called to the Anglican priesthood. It is also a phenomenally well-researched book; the impressive bibliography included as an appendix testifies to that. 

James Runcie

A significant character in the book (and not in the mystery stories, with good reason) is Robert Kendall, Amanda’s older brother. He is Sydney’s best friend and fellow Cambridge student. When the war begins, they join the same unit of the Scot Guards and eventually finding themselves fighting their way up the Italian peninsula, including the horrific battle around Monte Cassino. Robert is the natural leader, the life of the party, the golden boy who everyone expects will go on to do great things. Except Robert dies in the war.

At war’s end, Sydney is assigned temporarily to a British diplomatic mission in Trieste before returning home. The Kendall family remains devastated with their son’s death; Sydney himself is having a terrible time trying to understand his friend’s death and make sense of his own future life. It grows clear that Amanda is in love with him, but Sydney keeps deferring any of his own initiative. Instead, he focuses on what he comes to see as a calling to the priesthood, much to Amanda’s and his own family’s shock and dismay.

All the while there’s something lurking, something not disclosed or understood, in Sydney’s life. When it comes, the reader is at first shocked. And then the shock gives way almost immediately to clarity.

The Road to Grantchester is so good that I almost want to see Runcie set aside his mysteries and focus instead on novels like this one. But the novel and the mysteries are of a piece. A wonderful, often heart-wrenching piece. 

Related:

My review of Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death.

My review of Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night.

My review of Sidney Chambers and the Problem of Evil.

My review of Sidney Chambers and the Forgiveness of Sins.

My review of Sidney Chambers and the Dangers of Temptation.

My review of Sidney Chambers and the Persistence of Love.

“Sidney Chambers and the Persistence of Love” by James Runcie

The Masterpiece Theater Facebook page had a rather spirited (and occasionally mean-spirited) discussion about the “Grantchester” television series. Season 3 has taken a sharp turn toward the characters’ personal problems and angst – the police Inspector Geordie Keating has an affair with a secretary at the police station and the reverend Sidney Chambers is having growing difficulties reconciling his church position with his love for Amanda Richmond; Amanda is divorced and in the 1950s Church of England clergy could not marry divorcees and remain clergy.

The Facebook discussion quickly became a cultural debate, and how many British television shows with historical themes and narratives tend to impose the cultural values of the 2010s. We’ve seen it with “Grantchester” and with “Call the Midwife.” What happens is that the story line becomes almost promotional for contemporary cultural views, and we quickly get into politics and the culture wars.

My own observation in the discussion was that the Sidney Chambers books by author, filmmaker, and playwright James Runcie are nothing like what the television series has become. They move forward in time, they do a much better job of sticking to the cultural, social, and religious values of the period, and they are far more about Sidney Chambers and his spiritual reflections and growth, including his wrestling with doubt. In the books, Sidney does not have a love affair with Amanda, and Geordie is not unfaithful to his wife. For myself, the television series has become far less compelling than the books.

The sixth book has recently been published, and it continues in the same vein and narrative as its predecessors. Sidney Chambers and the Persistence of Love is comprised of six separate but connected stories, covering the first half of the 1970s. Sidney is the canon at Ely Cathedral (although Geordie remains a detective inspector in Grantchester) and he’s still finding himself pulled into mysteries.

In “The Bluebell Wood,” Sidney and his daughter Anna are walking in the woods, collecting flowers for Anna’s science project, when they find a body of a man among the bluebells. The death might be natural causes, or it might not. In “Authenticity,” Sidney almost forgets his tenth wedding anniversary. He has lunch with his friend Amanda (long divorced) and learns she may have discovered an unknown Goya, which is being put up for auction at an estate sales. But Amanda’s interest in the painting is skirting the boundaries of legality.

James Runcie

In “Insufficient Evidence,” Sidney’s and Geordie’s reporter friend Helena Mitchell, now married to the vicar at Grantchester (Sidney’s former position) is charging her photographer with rape. And it’s going to become an ugly trial. A valuable old book is stolen from a Cambridge college library in “Ex Libris,” and Sidney had to figure out not only who stole it but how it was stolen.

Sidney experiences a family crisis is “The Long Hot Summer,” when his nephew disappears. And in the final (and title) story of the collection, “The Persistence of Love,” Sidney faces an unexpected personal crisis – and it is a crisis that’s unexpected for the reader as well.

Sidney Chambers and the Persistence of Love is up to the mark of the previous books in the series. Runcie is able to evoke the spirit of the period by citing various current news events and often blending them into the stories. He’s demonstrating that a story set in recent history can be interesting and engaging without imposing contemporary cultural values on it.

Related:

My review of Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death.

My review of Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night.

My review of Sidney Chambers and the Problem of Evil.

My review of Sidney Chambers and the Forgiveness of Sins.

My review of Sidney Chambers and the Dangers of Temptation.

Top photograph: The nave of Ely Cathedral, where Sidney Chambers serves as canon.

“Sidney Chambers and the Dangers of Temptation”

It’s the late 1960s. The Nigerian civil war is unfolding into the starvation of Biafra. The Beatles continue to reign supreme in popular music. The United States is gearing up for Apollo 13 and the first walk by human beings on the moon.

And Ely Cathedral Archdeacon Sidney Chambers continues to insert himself – or fall into – one mystery after another. The man seems to simultaneously attract crime puzzles or insert himself into them, and sometimes both.

Sidney Chambers and the Dangers of Temptation, the new installment of the Grantchester mysteries, was published last month by British author and film producer James Runcie. (Inspiration for these Church of England mysteries likely came from having Robert Runcie, former Archbishop of Canterbury who died in 2000, for a father.) The new series of six stories continues to move Sidney along in time – he’s in his mid-40s and continuing as Archdeacon at Ely, some 20 miles from Cambridge and Grantchester. But he’s still working with Inspector Geordie Keating of the Cambridge Police, still helping his friends, and still wrestling with personal and theological issues.

In the title story, “The Dangers of Temptation,” Sidney is asked to help rescue a young man from a local commune that has elements of a cult. And then the head of the commune is murdered – by beheading. In “Grantchester Meadows,” a May partying rite at Cambridge University (held with English inexplicability in June) results in a student being almost trampled by a heard of cows and a valuable necklace being stolen.

In “The Trouble with Amanda,” Sidney’s one-time love interest and still good friend Amanda Richmond is having marital problems with her husband Henry, who’s having problems of his own with his former wife Connie, whose body is found bound and gagged in a pond. “The Return” focuses on the husband of Mrs. Maguire, Sidney’s former housekeeper in Grantchester, who turns up after being gone for 25 years.

James Runcie

In “A German Summer,” Sidney and his family vacation at a resort in the German Democratic Republic (this is long before the fall the Berlin Wall and reunification of Germany), and the resort owner dies in a motorcycle accident, which Sidney suspects is not an accident at all. And in the sixth story, “Love and Duty,” Sidney’s former curate Leonard Graham, now a vicar at St. Alban’s, is being blackmailed.

The stories of Sidney Chambers and the Dangers of Temptation are like their predecessors, in that they are often interrelated and form a long-running narrative of faith, family, friendship, and reconciling all of those with the way of the world. Sidney has to navigate some tricky situations, and like the rest of us, isn’t always consistent. But the stories are good ones, for both entertainment and reflection.

Related:

My review of Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death.

My review of Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night.

My review of Sidney Chambers and the Problem of Evil.

My review of Sidney Chambers and the Forgiveness of Sins.

Top photograph: Banks of the River Cam near Grantchester, via Wikipedia.