The Devil’s Novice, by Ellis Peters

The titular character in this eighth novel of the Brother Cadfael series [1] is a young man who has been taken in as a novice in order to escape a charge for murder that he did not commit but that his father believes him guilty of who is timid and overly intense by day and thrashes about in torment in the night with horrible sleep. He is troubled by having been accused falsely of violence, and by the torments of his extremely flirtatious future sister-in-law, who appears to enjoy drawing the attraction of every man around here, irrespective of the trouble she causes. For his torments, he is labeled as the devil’s novice and avoided by most of the other students, who are jealous of his brightness and find his suffering easy to make fun of. Naturally, Cadfael, being a sympathetic sort of person to outsiders and suffering innocents, takes him under his wing, and the result ends up being immensely surprising, to say the least, in a family situation that is extremely dysfunctional.

What is of immense interest is that the story of a mysterious missing and murdered priestly ambassador intermixes with the story of abbey politics along with the politics of marriage of nobles and the greater politics of the Anarchy of England, where the quarrels over the throne encourage overly ambitious lesser rules, like the ambitious Earls of Chester and Lincoln, to carve out mini-kingdoms for themselves and murder innocents in order to get the jump on their enemies, only to be foiled by having their plans revealed before they are fully ready. This is a novel where the twist is not personal, but political in nature, and where those who feign friendship are willing to kill to get their chance at advancement, even as others seek to protect their honor and reputation at extreme cost.

Like many of the Cadfael novels, this one has a lot of interlocking parts and memorable characters. Brother Mark, last seen helping the lepers of St. Giles, is seen here as a kindhearted soul whose decency in helping the troubled young novice earn him the path to education and a road into the priesthood, an immediate rise in his own social status. For the unwilling novice himself, he is cleared of charges, restored to the love of a wounded family, and given a chance at love with a young woman who loves him despite his faults and immensely foolish stubbornness. This is a play where most people receive a better fate than they deserve, and where a murder escapes immediate justice only to be pursued by a relentless assistant sheriff who means to take it out on his hide, possibly in a future novel, as armies are gathered in a complicated and multi-front war.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/02/25/book-review-the-sanctuary-sparrow/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/02/24/book-review-the-virgin-in-the-ice/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/02/13/book-review-the-leper-of-st-giles/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/book-review-st-peters-fair/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/book-review-monks-hood/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/book-review-one-corpse-too-many/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/book-review-a-morbid-taste-for-bones/