Changing history with a tenpenny knife

This is a strange and wonderful novel that deserves the most serious attention. Whenever Ron- ald Blythe’s name comes up in conversation the next sentence is always going to be, ‘Didn’t he write Akenfield?’ Akenfield is the unclassifiable classic of over 30 years ago, the portrait of Blythe’s birthplace in rural Suffolk and the memories and reflections of its people, and it is probably the first and best of its kind. But since then he has written in a steady stream histories, novels, short stories, literary criticism, studies of poets and diarists and divines (he’s an authority on George Herbert) and books about places, like the stunning Divine Landscapes about Britain’s holy sites. Lately he’s become a columnist for the Church Times and there’s not a bishop, priest or deacon who doesn’t turn first to Ronnie’s page and ‘Word from Wormingford’!

This new novel, although steeped in history and the Suffolk countryside, is different.