ANN is unhappily married to an unhappy vicar. Both she and her husband, Tim, were looking for some kind of personal completion in marriage, but it never worked from the beginning. Ann, who has no church background or faith to speak of, is soon “bent out of shape” by trying to be what she — and her husband — think a vicar’s wife should be.
Despite being haunted by a dark family tragedy, Ann is funny, clever, literate, optimistic, and hopeful, but Tim is infuriatingly pious, and dutiful, driven and blinkered by his sense of divine calling: “the closer Tim gets to God, the less he has a sense of humour,” Ann remarks. It is clear from early on that his wife is a non-person, a kind of ecclesiastical add-on, simply there to buttress his mission. Their son, Sam, is unable to question or engage with his father, and finds himself an awkward inconvenience, who retreats to Tolkien’s Middle-earth for comfort. They are living at cross purposes.
There is a memorial in the church to a former incumbent’s wife: “gentle, meek, quiet, self-denying humble”, it reads. “Boring,” concludes Sam. It seems as if Ann’s loss of identity isn’t helped by the eccentric, spiteful, and interfering congregation in their seaside Cornish parish, each of whose members who have their own ideas about how she should behave.
But the novel is not dreary, shot through as it is with acute and humorous observations on love, marriage, and the exigencies of family and community life. Ann is a companionable narrator, and we understand when she turns elsewhere for affection and self-esteem. We might cut her incorrigible husband more slack, too, but the author (Feature, 19 July 2024) keeps us hanging on until a mere 60 pages before the end to reveal the backstory that turns him from an erstwhile pantomime villain into a nuanced and wounded character whom we can begin to understand: a recognition that means that resolution, or at least accommodation, is now possible.
The Revd Malcolm Doney is a writer, broadcaster, and Anglican priest, who lives in Suffolk.
Cathy Rentzenbrink is a speaker at the Festival of Faith and Literature at the end of this month. Tickets can be bought from: faithandliterature.hymnsam.co.uk
Ordinary Time
Cathy Rentzenbrink
Orion £20
(978-1-4746-2117-5)
Church Times Bookshop £18
