Dave's Book Blog: "Christ on a Bike" by Orla Owen

Monday, 3 February 2025

"Christ on a Bike" by Orla Owen

A ingenious and fast-paced Faustian story with one of the most exciting and colourful baddies I have met in a long time.

Life seems to have passed Cerys by. Unpartnered, childless, she rents a flat in London and works. Out of the blue she inherits a huge modern house on the Welsh coast and an income for life. But it comes with conditions rigidly enforced by her benefactors. Can money buy Cerys happiness? Or is a sinister fate planned for her?

This is an intriguing exploration of the destabilising effects of sudden wealth and the corrosive consequences of jealousy and disappointed expectations. There's also an interesting religious dimension to what is to some extent the Book of Job backwards (Job loses everything, Cerys gains everything, but both are puppets manipulated by higher powers).

There was a certain amount of inevitability to the plot even while not all questions were answered: some details were carefully blurred - what happens to Mfanwy? - which made things seem more real, less of a story. But the character of Cerys is beautifully complex as she struggles with temptation and if her sister, Seren, is a slightly over-the-top villain, she is made real because every one of her reasons for villainy (jealousy, disappointment, exhaustion) are exactly what each of us experiences on a daily basis. Which is scary in itself.

It is written in the past tense and the third person omniscient though principally from the perspective of Cerys and, sometimes, Seren, both of whom have extensive internal monologues, usually delivered in long paragraphs giving a frenetic feeling.

A clever concept well executed.

Selected quotes:

“Nausea rose which she swallowed down, so well-practiced at keeping things just about under control.” (Ch 1)
“Who knew where life would take her? Nowhere. That's where.” (Ch 4)
“What if Thomas had ... done a deal with the devil to get a load of money and in order to not go to hell when he died, someone had to pray for him, absolve him of his sins? Along she'd come. ... If that was true, it meant the devil now owned her soul and the man following her on the bicycle, he was there to make sure she didn't run off.” (Ch 13)
“The stars knew where Cerys was. They'd watched the earth longer than man had lived on it.” (Ch 27)
“Christ looked scathingly at Seren. ... How dare he? Look at all the bad things his dad had done, even if his son was a goodie. None of them were absolute angels.” (Ch 29)
“What sort of world would it be if a person was rewarded for being greedy, nasty, rotten? What would humanity evolve into if one was seemingly rewarded for such behavior, if that was hailed as the way to get on in the world?” (Ch 32) Delightful irony!
“He was Welsh, therefore he was waterproof.” (Ch 33)