I loved Once Upon a River, and so when I saw this one at the local second hand book shop, I couldn’t resist. That book shop closed a few years ago – it just took me a while to get to this.
Here’s the blurb …
As a boy, William Bellman commits one small cruel act that appears to have unforeseen and terrible consequences. The killing of a rook with his catapult is soon forgotten amidst the riot of boyhood games. And by the time he is grown, with a wife and children of his own, he seems indeed, to be a man blessed by fortune.
Until tragedy strikes, and the stranger in black comes, and William Bellman starts to wonder if all his happiness is about to be eclipsed. Desperate to save the one precious thing he has left, he enters into a bargain. A rather strange bargain, with an even stranger partner, to found a decidedly macabre business.
And Bellman & Black is born.
I love historical fiction and this had a bit of magical realism thrown in as well. Set in Victorian times during the Industrial Revolution, I enjoyed all the mill references – improving the mill, improving the dying techniques, feeding the workers to keep them loyal, etc. And then the Bellman & Black emporium – an emporium for mourning – everything you could possibly need or want, coffin?, stationery? a mute to follow the coffin? All possible.
There is also chapters about rooks – different collective nouns, behaviours, two mythical rooks called Thought and Memory (‘They know everything and they do not forget’). I enjoyed the part about the rooks playing on the thermal air currents.
What does it mean to be alive? Who will tell our story when we are gone? What does it mean to be successful? All big questions tackled by this novel.
One of my favourite quotes
Dora will be sad and happy and ill and well. She will live the best she can for as long as she can and when she can do that no longer, she will die.
Sounds like a good formula.
