Havoc, in its Third Year

Information and Book Review

Current TurboBookSnob Ranking: 8

Ronan Bennett

Mr. Bennett was born in Belfast, and now lives in London with his family.  He has written several other novels.  The Catastrophist was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize in 1998.

Havoc, in its Third Year, is a well-crafted historical novel set amidst the religious cult of paranoia that pervaded England in the seventeenth-century. 

The protagonist, John Brigge, is a coroner and one of the governors of the town, a fair and upstanding man torn by his internal conflict between his own curious mixture of papism and ancient pagan religious rites, and the Protestantism that he must espouse in public to maintain his respect in the community and to secure the necessary safety for his family.

The religious havoc played out in Brigge's mind is echoed in his profession.  Called to town to preside over the evidence in the trial of an Irishwoman accused of murdering her newborn infant, Brigge finds himself determined to maintain an open mind about the case.  He requires evidence to establish Katherine Shay's guilt, rather than submitting to the townspeople's swelling hysteria or to his fellow governors' belief that surely a papist must be guilty.

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"Mr. Brigge?"

The voice was Adam's.

"Will you not begin the inquisition?"

The coroner dragged himself out of his thoughts.  They were waiting, all of them.  The jurors and the witnesses, impatient to hear the story of this sinner and wretch, of the child conceived in the sinful enjoyment of her woman's wantoness and murdered in the shame of it.  The women searchers of Shay's body, good and sufficient matrons with their stiff reproving necks and their milky fingers.  Doliffe, prim and thin-lipped.  Scaife, slavering and foaming like a run-out horse, unable to take his eyes from the Irishwoman.  The more Brigge felt their expectation, the less his appetite for the work at hand.  He felt suddenly weary.  His clothes were still damp.  His thighs and back ached.  He shifted forward, straightening his shoulders to ease the discomfort.

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