The Atwelle Confession

Confession: I chose this novel because there is a gargoyle on the cover. I am a sucker for gargoyles. Let me live inside our beloved Notre Dame, in the Cologne Cathedral, in St. Vitus in Prague with the scariest gargoyles I've ever seen (and honourable mention the darkly grotesque and utterly ugly gargoyles in the Hospital de Sant Pau in Barcelona that are truly scary to look at) and I'm happy, I feel at home. When I read the blurb though, I admit I had some suspicions, because the same old “two academics make a groundbreaking discovery and find the time to fall in love, while we move back and forth in time” can be quite boring. And yet, I thought ‘let's give it a try, you never know...' However, this book was no exception, sadly...

The story is divided between the present time and 1532, during the turbulent era of Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the monasteries. Two academics are on a mission to restore a church in Atwelle, a small English town, where they find a series of gargoyles that seem to be connected to a series of murders. It sounds interesting, and it really is, but there were so many problems with the unfolding of the story, in my opinion, and I now consider this novel a great disappointment.

Although the writer tries to create a dark atmosphere, with the tall, naked trees and the cold in the air, and the stormy nights, there were many problems that took over the story quickly. The dialogue is problematic and at times, unnatural, frightfully wooden and a bit silly. For example, a character asks a father about his children and he replies “I've lost count of how many they are.” I cannot imagine someone replying in such a way,unless he has more illegitimate children than Robert Baratheon, and here this wasn't the case. This is just one example of many strange quotations that didn't make much sense. In addition, the way the writer communicates the thoughts of the characters is confusing and a bit tacky. Think of contemporary soliloquies with uninspired humor. As you can tell, the interactions were pretty much and many times disappointing. I think the writer has very little idea of the daily speech during the times of Henry VIII. E.g. “There traditionally are...”“I can explain it entirely.”, “...let's just say..” Yes, this is modern speech, nothing to do with the 16th century. My eyes are bleeding....The cherry on top were all the syntactical mistakes, the spelling and punctuation problems, so at times, this ARC was almost unreadable.

The characters are equally problematic. I was bothered by Margeaux's almost racist behaviour towards a student who favours the Gothic style of clothing. She seems superficial and too naive to occupy the seat of a professor. Don is too forward, too flirty for a man who calls himself an academic. He seems almost condescending towards Margeaux, just because she's good looking and doesn't seem to take her seriously. “Now you're sounding like an academic.” Seriously? He doesn't sound like an academic himself, if I may say so. When discussing a gargoyle figure, Don says the exact following words: “Maybe the architect or the sculptor just thought this would be really cool.” If this is the language of an academic, I am right in having lost all faith in humanity.

So, what to do when the writing is mediocre at best, the characters irritate you to no end, and the story is interesting but goes to waste due to a multitude of issues? The wisest choice is to abandon it altogether. Since this was an ARC, I decided to persevere. It's a pity because the story had some potential, but, in my opinion, the execution was terrible...I don't know about Mystery, but Historical Fiction and dialogue in general are certainly not the author's great strengths...I read that he wrote a book about the coming of age of Jesus. I dread to think the dialogue in that one...I am sorry but no...

Many thanks to SelectBooks and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.