"Bellman & Black" by Diane Setterfield

 At the age of ten, with his catapult, William Bellman kills a rook. For fun. 

It's the sort of mindless wickedness that young boys get up to.

But it would seem that rooks exact a terrible revenge.

Not on Bellman himself. He grows up to have fun with girls and work in his uncle's mill and rise through the ranks of workers until he is in charge.

The rooks' vengeance is visited upon the innocent. So Bellman, though not really aware of what he is doing, makes a pact with Death.

This is an interesting twist upon the story of Faust, a sort of spooky story lurking beneath the veneer of a fictionalised biography of a Victorian man of business.

It has a nice structure. It is split almost fifty fifty between part one which is set in the idealised village where paradise slowly goes wrong and the second part which is set in the centre of London, after the bargain. The first hint that all might not be well in the village paradise comes almost exactly one-third of the way through the first bit, but then things buck up for a while before going terribly wrong in the last twenty pages.

Great moments:

• "He is not just black, he is blacker than that. His is a luxurious superabundance of blackness never seen in any other creature. He is the essence of blackness." (Prologue, &)
• "In the first verse of the hymn, the congregation was tuneless and as disorganised as a herd of sheep on market day." (1.1)
• "He inhabited his vigorous body with grace and ease." (1.1)
• "He saw afresh how old his father was. Fragility, folly and authority that clings beyond its time." (1.5)
• "He mimicked the great rumble of the sea, the fearsome eruption of volcanoes, the creaking of glaciers and the geological groaning as the world split apart in its agony and remade itself." (1.12,&) 
• "People remembered. They wept and they grieved. In the spaces between, they were glad that the leeks and rhubarb were doing well this year, envied the bonnet of their neighbour's cousin, relished the fragrance of pork roasting in the kitchen on Sunday." (2.1)
• "You could lose your bearings if you spent excessively long periods engaged on a single project at the expense of rest and friendship and the peaceful contemplation of life's mysteries." (2.17)
• "Time passes more quickly for the man who lies abed than for the busy man. The more I have to do, the more time I have to do it." (2.21)
• "She was so close he saw the inner part of her lips as they opened and closed." (2.22)

A well-written and enjoyable read. October 2020; 388 pages

An even better book is Setterfield's Once Upon a River