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The Language of the Night: The Neighborhood Druid [1]
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Date: 2025-02-17
A few years ago, when I was flat on my back and complaining mightily about the flu, I got it in my head to read of all of C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner novels. In order. Consecutively.
Between Christmas and Twelfth Night, I read them — or rather, skimmed them all and slowed down at the good parts. It was nuts but it kept me entertained through my recovery. I realized a couple of things in that experience: 1) I’m not naturally a binger (books or television). I must read plots differently than most people because I start to look at the machinery that moves the plot along, and then I lose patience because it becomes predictable. Cherryh frustrated me in that quirk of my personality, because she kept me intrigued by the varied plotlines. If there were nothing else to recommend Foreigner, there would be that: you don’t know exactly how anything is going to turn out, or what side quests will become major plot points. [There are many other things to recommend about Foreigner, by the way.] and 2) this series will never, never end. Ever.
It’s not a bad thing. It’s a reality that, no matter what happens in the future, Bren Cameron will always be engaged with the Atevi. In the same way, Miss Marple will always be fussing about her garden not being taken care of properly. And Ruth Galloway will always be tripping over murder victims. Yes, I did it again: I power-read a series. Well, two series.
I’ve been taking a break from fantasy lately. No particular reason. And for no particular reason, I downloaded all of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novels onto my Kindle (You know, they’re not easy to find on Kindle and I downloaded a probably-not-entirely-sanctioned version that was very easy to get lost in. I don’t recommend doing that.) and read them in succession. It was satisfying and I was ready to move on to Poirot. Then my sister told me she was reading a mystery I had given her, one of Elly Griffith’s Ruth Galloway books, and I thought that, since the series is now finished and I read only the first half of the books, I might take a look at the second half.
This time I went to the library and pulled the last eight novels. I read them in five days. Not skimming, but actually reading. Not doing much of anything else, either. For someone whose attention is often the object of great competition, it was glorious to be left alone to dive into a pleasurable set of books. I even enjoyed the guilt that comes from ignoring all the stuff I was supposed to be doing.
Mysteries, however, are not science fiction; they operate along a set of conventions and plot mechanics, the most prominent one being that, after a series of red herrings and misdirections, the culprit will turn out to be the least likely person(s) imaginable. Agatha Christie is a given for having her books and stories fall into this tradition; in fact, she just about set the machinery up, and mystery writers have been employing her useful tools ever since. Elly Griffith, on the other hand, mixes it up a bit, and it’s the way she mixes things up that I want to point out. (There really is an intersection with fantasy here, so bear with me.)
Griffith’s protagonist, Ruth Galloway, is not a typical lead character but is, rather, a 40-ish forensic archaeologist with a complicated personal life and body image issues. She’s also good at her job, but her job, annoyingly for an archaeologist, is complicated by murder victims turning up in every novel and said victims leading to her involvement with a grumpy police inspector and almost invariably a life-threatening situation. Ruth is like Indiana Jones, minus the glamor and plus a bad back.
Which is why she’s so relatable, especially for women readers of a certain age. Who doesn’t have body image issues and a touch of arthritis?
Anyway, the books are fun.
The last two in the series, The Locked Room and The Last Remains are standouts, if for no other reason, because they’re set during the Covid lockdown, and reading them was a memory shock.
It has been so easy to forget the anxiety and real fear that surrounded the start of the Covid pandemic, the adoption of new protocols that were being refined on the fly as information became available, the misinformation, the wacky supposed “cures” and preventative measures, the panicked buying and retail shortages, but they’re all fresh in The Locked Room.
“I was just about to send you an email,” says Janet. “This is all a bit scary, isn’t it?” “It doesn’t seem real,” says Ruth. “Words like pandemic and lockdown belong in a science fiction novel.” “Or a history book,” says Janet. “I keep thinking how it must have felt during the plague in Norwich. There were people called ‘keepers’, appointed to make sure residents stayed in their houses. They used to carry red wands, about a metre long, to encourage others to keep their distance. There were ‘watchers’ too.” “Social distancing,” says Ruth. The Locked Room, pp. 133-134
The Locked Room doesn’t feature the strongest or most compelling of Ruth Galloway plots, but it accomplishes two important things: it’s a reminder about the lockdown and the way that community was central to staying sane through the uncertainty, and the secondary plot features, as Galloway books often do, Norwich’s favorite Druid, Cathbad.
Cathbad weaves his way in and out of the Galloway mysteries, always in the right place at the right time, knowing more than he says, a gentle and moderating influence, and always driving Nelson, Ruth’s grouchy sometimes-lover, around the bend. He appears in the first Ruth Galloway book, The Crossing Places, first as an antagonist and then as a beneficent force, and remains that way but, throughout the series, he’s rather unknowable, a true cipher of a character. By The Locked Room, he’s out of action, physically anyway, because he contracts a bad case of the virus and quickly advances to a ventilator.
“I just can’t imagine a world without Cathbad,” says Judy. “Nor can I,” says Clough. “Do you remember when we first met him? Bloody great tempest raging on the Saltmarsh. Thunder and Lightning. Cathbad gets out of the car and says to the boss, ‘I’ll be your guide.’ And then they disappear into the night. I honestly thought it would be the last time I saw either of them.” The Locked Room, p. 285
That night of the bloody great tempest, a link formed between Nelson, the no-nonsense police inspector, and Cathbad the mystic, and if you read the book, you know that it involved Nelson saving Cathbad’s life. Then, in A Room Full of Bones, Cathbad saves Nelson from a curse gone awry, in an episode as mysterious as they come.
Each of the mystical episodes that follow in subsequent books offer plausible, rational explanations that will suffice. But cumulatively, the reality of a world beyond what we can see, one that Cathbad can reach, is undeniable. As much as Nelson tries to disregard the mystical (and readers are left to decide for themselves), Griffiths leans into the reality of Cathbad’s mysticism with the occasional reminder that Nelson knows what a murmuration is. He won’t admit how he knows it until quite late in the series: it’s because Cathbad taught it to him in the Dreamtime, and he remembers it. In fact, every time they meet on that mystical shore, Nelson is just as impatient and grouchy as ever, and Cathbad is still as annoying.
They’re a quite fun pair, the hard-boiled cop and the Druid, who ends up quite ill from long Covid, but who still manages to put together the elements that solve the mystery. Sort of.
“Can you remember anything else?” “It’s still behind the veil,” says Cathbad. “Like being in the dream world. Remember?” ”How can I remember something that has only ever existed in your overheated imagination?” [Nelson is ever a skeptic, but at length will admit he knows better.] “The first thing I remember is waking up in the hospital,” says Cathbad. “But I heard voices. Ruth. Hecate. Judy. Lucy Downey. I always thought Lucy would come back you know. I always thought she’d have a part to play before the end.” The end of what? thinks Nelson. He thinks of Clough, hard-headed Clough, consulting Madame Rita. Of Cathbad, lost in the dream world. Who knows any more what’s real and what isn’t? The Last Remains, p. 343
In a world of forensics and police procedures, the Ruth Galloway mysteries make room for a healthy heaping of spiritualism and mysticism. Cathbad is not only a delightful character, a lapsed Irish Catholic reborn as a Druid who also teaches Yoga online during shutdown, he keeps the other characters — Ruth on the lonely Saltmarsh, Nelson with his hard-bitten cynicism, Judy in her unlikely romance — mindful that there’s a limit to knowledge and beyond that, sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith.
The new schedule
Monday, February 24: Angmar
Monday, March 3: DrLori
Monday, March 10: Desiderata Detritus
Monday, March 17: DrLori
Monday, March 24: open and open hereafter
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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