This is a strange and wonderful novel that deserves the most serious attention. Whenever Ron- ald Blythe’s name comes up in conversation the next sentence is always going to be, ‘Didn’t he write Akenfield?’ Akenfield is the unclassifiable classic of over 30 years ago, the portrait of Blythe’s birthplace in rural Suffolk and the memories and reflections of its people, and it is probably the first and best of its kind. But since then he has written in a steady stream histories, novels, short stories, literary criticism, studies of poets and diarists and divines (he’s an authority on George Herbert) and books about places, like the stunning Divine Landscapes about Britain’s holy sites. Lately he’s become a columnist for the Church Times and there’s not a bishop, priest or deacon who doesn’t turn first to Ronnie’s page and ‘Word from Wormingford’!
This new novel, although steeped in history and the Suffolk countryside, is different. It is fierce, sensuous, rich and agonising, the story he has wanted to write since boyhood when he bicycled around the Stour lands and passed through the tiny village of Ovington and heard them say, ‘A murderer lived here.’ This must have been the early 1930s. The murder was committed in 1628.
The murderer was John Felton, a non- descript lieutenant in the army known to history as ‘a fanatic’. The murdered man was George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham at the time of Charles I, a man who was bleeding England dry and fast becoming more important than the king.
Felton was the younger son of an East Anglian squire whose fortune lay only in his rank, and in the ruthless English way with younger sons he was packed off with a little money, a horse and one servant and told to make his own way.
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