(Reading)

I have of late been reading the novelistic work of John Clutterbuck Porius. After my enjoyment of his first novel, in which a man walks around the Yeovil area with a large stick, I was eager to read everything he had written. I was not disappointed by his second novel, A Westonbirt Romance, in which a man walks around Gloucestershire with a large stick, nor by his third and fourth in which the author wisely does not diverge from this winning formula, (but cunningly moves the action to the county of Dorset)*. Indeed, how many novels could be improved by getting rid of all that extraneous plot, and simply featuring a man walking around – the Kent marshes, say -- with a large stick!

But, oh! how disappointed I was when I came to read his novel of the Middle Ages, The Brazen Herd, to find that our author had discarded what heretofore had served him well. Certainly we meet within the first few pages a man with a lovingly-described mace

“surmounted by a round ball which was as big as any ordinary man’s head entirely covered by iron spikes”

and which, in my innocence, I imagined Clutterbuck Porius had substituted for a large stick in honour of the medieval setting – but all too soon this character was lost sight of amidst a host of others, forming a colourful tapestry full of intrigue and historical detail. I put the book down in disgust, and if any of my readers happens to have finished it, could they please inform me of what happens in the end, and whether the man uses his mace at any point, perhaps to swish some vegetable growth out of the way, or at least to lean on while admiring a view ....
____________

(* Cunningly, I say, because several reviewers have seen this peculiarity of Clutterbuck Porius' novels as a conscious homage to Thomas Hardy, every single one of whose books begins with some variation on the line “A man was walking along a lane in Dorset”.)