“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.

James Runcie’s “Sidney Chambers and the Problem of Evil”

“Evil could seed itself in the quietest places and grow unchecked for years, spreading its malevolent influence until it was too late to stop.”

No, that’s not a commentary on the current U.S. presidential cycle. That’s the fictional Sidney Chambers, Anglican vicar of a church in Grantchester near Cambridge in the United Kingdom, musing to himself in James Runcie’s Sidney Chambers and the Problem of Evil.

Runcie, an author and film producer, has written a continuing series of stories about Sidney Chambers which form the basis for the popular ITV (in the U.S.) and PBS (in the U.S.) series The Grantchester Mysteries (season 2 begins on PBS on March 27). Each of the four volumes are collections of stories, done in independent-yet-related-story style of John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey. Sidney Chambers and the Problem of Evil is the third in the series, and rather than the expected six stories in the volume of its two predecessors, it’s comprised of four longer stories.

The stories cover the period 1962 to 1963, and Runcie includes enough factual events of the period to provide a context of authenticity – the rededication of Coventry Cathedral,  the death of C.S. Lewis, geopolitical developments, and others.

In the title story, “The Problem of Evil.” Sidney helps local Inspector Geordie Keating investigate what becomes a series of murders – of local vicars. The case starts with two dead doves left of Chambers’ doorstep, and escalates to something far worse.

In “Female, Nude,” Sidney is attending an art exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge when a young woman removes her long fur coat and makes rather a spectacle of her nude self as she sings a French song. Minutes later, a painting is discovered to have been cut from its frame, stolen.

James Runcie

In “Death by Water,” Sidney finds himself playing a minor role in a movie production of The Nine Tailors by mystery writer Dorothy Sayers, courtesy of a friend who is the director and wants to film in an “authentic local area” like Grantchester. Sidney plays (surprise) a vicar, and is learning the ups and downs (and moral highs and lows) of the movie businesses when one of the actors dies in what looks like, but isn’t, an accident.

The final story, “Christmas, 1963,” a baby is stolen from the maternity ward of the local Cambridge hospital, and Sidney has a case of double anxiety over it, for his wife Hildegard is imminently expecting their first child.

Through these collections of stories, Runcie is advancing Sidney both chronologically (the series starts in the 1950s) as well as spiritually. Sidney is familiar to us as a man of faith who wrestles with doubt and issues just as much as the rest of us do. He could easily have become either a failed priest or a hard-shell one, but Runcie makes him real, his humanity and flaws recognizable because we share them.

Sidney Chambers and the Problem of Evil is not only a collection of good mystery stories, but also a discussion of the frailties and strengths of faith.

Related:

My review of Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death.

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

Photograph by Cambridge by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

In Praise of the Mystery Story: The Problem of Good

I’ve been reading the Sidney Chambers mysteries by James Runcie, a series of books on an Anglican vicar near Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s that’s the basis for the popular Grantchester mysteries on PBS. While it’s not as apparent in the television shows, Runcie’s stories do more than offer interesting mysteries with an engaging amateur detective. The stories typically pose theological questions, as Chambers wrestles with faith, doubt and the various issues that people of faith contend with.

I was reading Sidney Chambers and the Problem of Evil (review next week) when a not terribly original thought entered my head. We hear so much about the problem of evil. Why does (or would) God allow evil? What do bad things happen to good people? Why does God allow a small child to get cancer? Why earthquakes and tornadoes? Why Hitler and Stalin? Why ISIS?

The not terribly original thought was that perhaps we’re asking the wrong question. What if the real question wasn’t about all the evil that God allows in the world, but all the good? Why is there so much good in the world?

I went looking for some answers.

A Presbyterian pastor, D. Marion Clark, published The Problem of Good: When the World Seems Fine Without God in 2014. A collection of essays by different writers, it takes a different view than the one I’m pursuing. The essays are more aimed at trying to explain why good seems to exist just fine without God.

Amazon has that one entry when you query “the problem of good.” Substitute “the problem of evil,” and you get 100 pages of entries. We Christians tend to be preoccupied with the question of evil, because it that set of questions from non-Christians that are perplexing without resorting to an in-depth lecture of the fall, original sin, marred creation, and related topics.

Why is there so much good in the world?

I found an answer that was intriguing because it went directly to a more basic issue: how do we know the difference between good and evil? What is it that says something is good, like helping the poor or sick, and something is bad, like gossip or physically attacking a person?

Most of us would focus on consequences or results – but bad things can often flow from good intentions (and we need look no further than our own federal government for untold numbers of examples).

Author and Christian apologist Greg Koukl concisely addressed my question in a blog post three years ago. We know the difference between good and evil because there is a pre-existing moral standard. Even if we are the most ardent of atheists or agnostics, we acknowledge that standard every time we raise the question of “why evil?”

I didn’t expect a mystery story to take me down a theological path, even a mystery story involving a vicar, but it did. It also reminded me that G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown Mysteries did much the same thing when they were written beginning a century ago.

Some mystery stories can possibly double as theological treatises.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.