Astercote

Penelope Lively is an author who is interested in the intersections and echoes between the present and the past, whether it's through the presence of a very real ghost (Thomas Kempe) or a kind of mass possession channelling an ancient ritual (Hagworthy) or a straightforward time-slip story (Cross Stitch).

In Astercote, though there are hints that this might be a time slip story at the beginning (the character of Goacher, who seems almost medieval at first meeting; the sound of the bells), the novel is more like Wild Hunt of Hagworthy in that historical patterns and fears begin to play out in the present day (albeit 1970, when the book was written). The village of Charlton Underwood is haunted by the lost village of Astercote, deserted after the Black Death, and when the chalice that is supposed to have protected the village is lost, people start to behave in irrational ways, barricading the village and fearing an outbreak of the plague.

It was weird to read this book so soon after the pandemic, when quarantine was a sensible response to danger and not a bizarre echo of a vanished past. These days it's irrational to disbelieve in the plague. There is more evidence of Lively's love for a good ruin, giving us not only the overgrown medieval village but also a collapsed manor house with trees growing out of it. There are many borderlines here -- between village and countryside, childhood and adulthood (intellectually disabled Goacher sits in the middle), new and old parts of the village divided by the road, as well as past and present (and is there a hint that young nurse Evadne, the children's ally, might be mixed race?)

Ultimately though, Astercote is a story of mass hysteria rather than magic, as as such, less appealing to me than Lively's other more supernatural stories.