From On Beulah Height to Midnight Fugue: Reginald Hill

 

On Beulah Height & Midnight Fugue

 by Reginald Hill

published 1998 & 2009 

I am working through Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe books,

-       see more on the project here

Dalziel & Pascoe, an Overview: the Early Years

And click on the Reginald Hill tag to find other posts on him.

 

I was waiting for On Beulah Height, which I remembered as being a high point, with a complex and extraordinary plot, a particularly atmospheric setting, and a sighting of Reservoir Noir, a genre name I like to think I invented over the years.

Reservoir Noir and Long Hot Summers

Dendale, a small Yorkshire village, was ‘drowned’ 15 years before – all the residents moved out and then a valley filled with water to create a reservoir. In its final days, young girls went missing and were never found.

Now, all these years later, another girl has gone missing: and a long hot summer is emptying the reservoir. Will there be revelations when the buildings re-emerge?

Hill has used a theme of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder – songs for dead children – throughout. One of the characters, a talented singer who grew up in Dendale, has done her own colloquial translation of the songs – presumably Hill did this – with local references.

I think maybe my willingness to read about missing children has reduced over the years: I could objectively admire the book for its atmosphere, its clues and its resolution, but the children in it (living and dead) were too upsetting, and I don’t think I will read it again.

I did have a few complaints on this one: I found the local history and Nina and the Nix awful and unnecessary. There was a map at the beginning that I found worse than useless – I was forever turning back to it and not being able to match up and make sense of it – and this is a book where geography is very important. There are St Michael’s and St Luke’s churches, both with their roles to play. But at one point St George’s suddenly appears: I suspect this was an editing mistake. (there are other Georges, and a Geordie, as characters so perhaps it was changed for that reason, but two instances remained.)

The final explanations were memorable and sad, but perhaps too wrenching.

So my verdict is: Insanely clever and brilliant, but horrible, with lost child content & strange add-ons. But the writer cannot be faulted. 

Hill was a polymath and wrote amazingly varied books – Pictures of Perfection was so light compared with this, while The Wood Beyond was so dark and sad. He was an amazingly talented writer.

The singer in the book, known as Elizabeth Wulfstan some of the time, is not playing the game as a conventional lieder singer, neither in appearance nor in how she presents herself generally. So I chose a different kind of picture, because it happens to show one of my favourite opera singers, Rosa Ponselle, singing at a piano in 1954.

 

 

 

After On Beulah Height came Arms and the Woman 1999  Very entertaining as it went along, but degenerated into total thriller at end, which I did not enjoy.

Dialogues of the Dead  2001  A serial killer book, clever and with unusual aspects which we cannot reveal…

…and then Death’s Jest Book 2002 is almost part 2 to Dialogues, and is outrageous but a good read

Good Morning Midnight  2004 annoying, linking Iraq war & family, too complex

The Death of Dalziel 2007   Interesting. An explosion fells Dalziel, and he is in a coma in a hospital bed for most of the book – though still, of course, a major presence. Elsewhere there are  spooks & Iraq as well as Yorkshire, and so many questions….

 

A Cure For All Diseases 2008 Hill was experimenting with form, so it has emails and tape transcripts and honestly, I found it close to unreadable. Those sections were unedited and badly laid out. But you know what - good for him, still trying new things. The return of Franny Roote, that uncomfortable character. Also, the book was based on the Jane Austen minor work Sanditon.

 

And then, wonderfully, came Midnight Fugue, 2009, which turned out to be the last one – Hill died at the beginning of 2012. It is marvellous,  a complete return to form – I think demonstrating that Cure for all Diseases really was an experiment, not a decline.

Midnight Fugue is incredibly clever and well-plotted. It takes place over less than 24 hours, with setpieces in a fancy hotel (who could possibly have bugged Dalziel's table out on a terrace? Ahhh...), and in the home of a master-criminal. There is a huge cast. There is police corruption, a husband who has been lost for seven years but may be coming back, journalists on the trail. And a fear that Andy Dalziel may have lost his edge – is he looking a bit deflated, somewhat tired? But you must never underestimate him...

Late on, Dalziel wants to do something unorthodox and possibly dangerous (what a surprise), breaking the rules. Pascoe objects of course – might he be about to finally stand up to Dalziel and take his own course?

But then:

Pascoe shook his head, like a man waking from a dream, smiled wryly, even rather sadly, and said, ‘Oh, all right then. But if you get me killed, I’m not going to be the one who tells Ellie! Dennis, ring Sergeant Wield, tell him what’s going off and where, and get that ARU moving quick!’

Another of the team is watching this interaction closely:

‘And then,’ as Seymour was later to tell his enthralled audience, ‘they went running off down the corridor like a couple of big kids on their way to a party!’

A wonderful image, and the way I will remember them.

And then: of all surprising things, the book reminded me of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall books – the first appeared the same year as Midnight Fugue. I once attended a talk by her, and she said that the key element of her story was something Thomas Cromwell says (in Bring Up the Bodies) to a nobleman who has had a man killed:

You think this is only one man and he doesn’t matter, but you see he does. You think a year or more has passed and no one remembers, but I remember. You believe the law should be what you would like it to be, and it is on that principle that you conduct yourself in your holdings on the marches of Wales, where the king’s justice and the king’s name are brought into contempt every day.

That, said Hilary Mantel, is the key to the whole trilogy, and to the life and work of Cromwell: in the end justice must prevail. I’m not sure this applies totally to Cromwell and the plot, that doesn't always stand up, but I like the principle, and there is a similar idea underlying Midnight Fugue.

[Wolf Hall is all over the blog: in particular I wrote a tribute to Hilary Mantel when she died: you can read it here:

Hilary Mantel RIP - tribute in i newspaper ]

 

Midnight Fugue is a tour de force, I was lost in admiration: the plotting, the placing of the characters at any given time, the rhythm of people racing round behind or in front of each other. An absolute masterpiece – what a way to go out.

File:Butterley Reservoir - geograph.org.uk - 6997118.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

(slight disagreement online as to whether it is in Yorkshire or Derbyshire – it is on the border)

File:Remains of the drowned village repairs - Capel Coffa Tryweryn gerllaw Llyn Celyn - Capel Celyn Memorial Chapel - drowned by Liverpool 04.jpg - Wikimedia Commons