Peter
Robinson is the author of the Inspector Banks series, set in Yorkshire, where he lived before emigrating to Canada.
Caedmon’s Song is a departure from that series, recounting the stories of two young women: the first, Kirsten, is in her final year at university when she is
attacked on her way home from an end-of-term party and left for dead. She survives the assault, but the savage knife attack leaves her with horrific internal injuries, and as the full extent of those injuries is gradually revealed to her, she realises that her life will never be the same again. Her physical and emotional pain is compounded by her inability to remember very much about the incident, and with next to nothing to go on, it isn’t going to be easy for the police to catch her assailant.
Martha Browne, meanwhile, is a strange kettle of fish, a young woman who arrives in Whitby on the East Yorkshire coast, ostensibly to gather research for a book she’s supposedly intending to write. There is no book of course; moreover, Martha has come to hunt down an as yet unknown person. All we’re told is that it’s a man – Martha herself doesn’t know his name or even that he really does live in the town - but all her instincts tell her that she’s come to the right place. Keeping a low profile, she begins to put together a plan to trap her prey.
The back cover describes the book as a psychological thriller, and while I can see what the publishers were getting at, I’d dispute the second part of that description. Thrillers are meant to keep you on the edge of your seat and you’re certainly not supposed to be able to guess the ending, whereas this one didn’t and I did, in that order. Switching tediously between chapters unimaginatively entitled “Martha” and “Kirsten”, as though we wouldn’t be able to work this out for ourselves, the two separate plotlines trundled on unconvincingly, the more so in Martha’s case, where matters eventually ground to a decidedly un-thrilling and disappointing conclusion.
Without blowing my own trumpet, it didn’t take me very long to figure out what was going on here, but since I invariably think I’ve got things worked out and am proved hopelessly wrong by the time I’ve reached the end of a book, I clung on to the hope that this would be another of those occasions. What a let-down then, when there turned out to be not a single red herring to be found in a town noted for its fishing industry! It was ten pages from the end of the book before
Robinson, rather patronisingly, decided to ‘reveal all’, but it’s difficult to believe that there would be anybody still waiting for the penny to drop by that late stage in the proceedings.
Although it wasn’t published until 2003, Robinson actually began writing Caedmon’s Song in 1987, so inevitably, it’s a little dated, but in fact, the images conjured up by his descriptions of the seaside towns Martha frequents somehow seem to predate that era by a decade or more. The drab little bed-and-breakfast establishments and smoke-filled, greasy-spoon cafes where she spends much of her time belong more to an earlier age, as do the downtrodden holidaymakers seeking respite from their humdrum working lives, whom she encounters on her travels. And was anybody under retirement age really called Martha in the late 1980s?
There are other aspects which grate heavily: the police sending two clearly embarrassed male detectives to question Kirsten as she recovers in hospital after the assault, for example. I think that even as long ago as 1987, the force’s sensitivity to sexual attacks on young women would have been sufficient to have had at least one female officer in attendance during the harrowing interviews, even if procedures weren’t as sophisticated and modern then as they are now. And as for the ease with which Martha tracks down her mystery man, had Whitby’s population consisted of a couple of hundred people instead of thousands, their numbers swollen further by the influx of tourists, it might have been just about believable. As it is, I bet the police regretted not having her around when they were looking for the Yorkshire Ripper all those years ago. Just think of the man-hours and overtime they could have saved.
I’m struggling to find anything positive to write about Caedmon’s Song, and perhaps the kindest thing I can say is that the scenic descriptions of Yorkshire’s east coast, with its bays and headlands, were realistically written, making it easy to appreciate the nature of the surroundings and to picture the locale. What a pity the rest of the book didn’t match those standards, turning out to be a mediocre and unconvincing plot with a disappointing ending, one where I had to stop myself from turning to the last page prematurely. Not from breathtaking suspense, but in an effort to get it over with as quickly as possible.