The Short Day Dying

Peter Hobbs' debut novel is a sustained and beautiful piece of writing about one man's crisis of faith in extremis; it is almost unremittingly bleak but all the more powerful for so being.

Charles Wenmouth is a young blacksmith living in the far reaches of south-west England; in the few hours he has to spare from his work he dedicates himself to the Methodist church, walking great distances to preach to ever-dwindling congregations. He also visits the sick, in particular a young blind woman called Harriet French who lies near to death, tended by her mother.

In Harriet, Charles sees faith burning brightly. He spends as much time as he can sitting by her bedside and comforting her, although in reality it is Charles who draws comfort from Harriet's spiritual strength. When she dies, the structure of Charles' faith begins to implode as he questions anew the meaning of life and death.

The novel is set in 1870 , a time of desperation for the families of the south west. Out of economic necessity, many wage earners had been forced to leave their farms and work in the tin mines, but this was a hazardous way of scratching a living. By 1870, many of the seams had been worked out and unemployment was rife. In happier times a generation before, the churches had been full on the Sabbath, but now Charles finds himself preaching to a handful of elderly parishioners at most.

Circumstances begin to overwhelm Charles: his work is exhausting, his accommodation meagre and his landlady bitter and miserly ; he is far from home and separated from his friends. His one solace is the landscape around him, but even this palls as he sinks further into despair: 'The land is alive but that life is sickening and ugly and sucking on us and God is not in it.'

As a narrator, Charles reminds me somewhat of Edmund Talbot in William Golding's To the Ends of the Earth trilogy: both are well-meaning but slightly pompous; their love for a woman blinds them to the needs of others (although they would deny this); and both have a tendency to look down on people without knowing their circumstances.

Like Edmund, however, Charles is a far from unsympathetic character; to witness his decline is a terrible thing. The sheer beauty of Hobbs' writing penetrates to the heart of Wenmouth's lonely, battered soul: 'I know what this feeling is it is loss and it is harrowing and I am afraid.' With raw despair comes his realisation that our time on earth is fleeting and that we can do nothing about it.