Angel with Two Faces

Escaping the worst of Christmas Day, I closeted myself with Nicola Upson's excellent Angel with Two Faces. Set a few months after the events of An Expert in Murder, it follows Josephine Tey as she heads down to Cornwall to visit Archie Penrose's ancestral home, partly to work on a new novel — A Shilling for Candles — and partly to strengthen her friendship with Archie.

But Josephine's arrival in Loe comes at a bad time for the village. A young stablehand has died under mysterious circumstances, possibly by his own hand, and his death has sent ripples through a claustrophobic community where everyone seems to have something to hide. Events come to a head midway through a performance of The Jackdaw of Rhiems at the Minack Theatre, and Archie finds himself officially in charge of a murder investigation. Josephine, meanwhile, has somehow become confidante to half the village and finds herself struggling to reconcile her conscience with what she believes Archie ought to know.

As with Upson's previous novel, Angel with Two Faces assembles a cast of excellent characters and sets them against a wonderfully brooding backdrop. Aside from Archie and his immediate family, the principle characters are the Pinching family: poor, dead, Harry; his twin sister Morwenna; his 14 year-old sister Loveday; and, in the background, the memories of their parents killed in a fire 8 years before. Devastated by her brother's death and barely able to cope with Loveday's vagueness and wandering nature, Morwenna is a convincing portrait of a woman collapsing into deep depression and anger.

Of the other characters, Nathaniel the troubled village curate is particularly fine. Having struggled with painful shyness, Nathaniel has managed to get himself into a position where he will take over the parish when the current vicar retires, only to be confronted with the realisation that he is in love with Harry Pinching. As if that wasn't enough Nathaniel has become close to Loveday and has found himself burdened with one of the Pinching family's secrets — something that promises to further alienate him from Morwenna.

The key to the book is the character of Morveth Wearne, the shrewd village schoolteacher, who is respected by everyone in village as some sort of wise woman. It is Morveth who collects each individual secret and who, with the best of intentions, gently guides each of the villagers into doing what she believes to be the right thing. But as Josephine quickly realises, Morveth's attempts to help actually cause great harm because her knowledge is necessarily imperfect and she often acts on what she believes to be the truth of a situation and not the situation as it actually is.

Delightfully gothic.