A Charitable Body by Robert Barnard

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


"'Everything in the garden is lovely,' said Charlie.
But of course that was before the discovery of the body."

Robert Barnard's A Charitable Body (2012) is quite a minor literary effort, and that's putting it quite charitably. To borrow a clichéd phrase, it has a lot to be modest about. This 'novel of suspense' - as promised on the cover - does not deliver much excitement. The characterizations are far from convincing, and even the Barnard's trademark feat - his plots usually have more interesting endings than beginnings - is missing. All in all, the novel feels like having been written solely to fulfill a contractual obligation to the publisher.

The Walbrook Manor in West Yorkshire, "one of England's minor heritage buildings" which had been sort of jointly owned by the Quarles and Fiennes families, was handed over - for financial reasons - to Walbrook Trust. The Manor is now a tourist attraction and the Walbrook Trust Board is running the project. The Board politics, animosities between its members, and Sir Stafford Quarles' (who chairs the Board) thirst for power dominate much of the early stages of the plot. A public concert is held at Walbrook: it includes a song cycle composed in the times of the First World War. This music item plays an important role in the mystery. (A question, though: why did the author consider it necessary to list every single piece performed at the concert? Space filler, I guess.)

We meet Felicity - the wife of Detective Inspector Charlie Peace - as she is invited to serve on the Walbrook Manor Board. This unsophisticated literary device allows the good inspector to get a lot of background information without having to resort to official means. It also allows the reader to see the plot from both sides: the "in" side, as from the Board's members perspective, and from the "out" side, the police procedural.

Perhaps the only really interesting aspect of the plot is Walbrook Manor's role in the 1920s and 1930s when it housed a sort of psychiatric asylum and also served as a venue for seminars held under the guise of peacemaking to prevent the outbreak of war with Germany. The participants in these seminars have been suspected of Nazi sympathies at worst and of trying to appease Hitler at best. The story goes on various tangents, some of them overly sensational and "colorful" such as a wartime brothel in London, and it does not hold the reader's attention.

This is quite likely the weakest of the eighteen novels by Mr. Barnard that I have reviewed on Goodreads.

One and a half stars.



View all my reviews