Christmas Night by Paul Westmoreland

In Matthew, chapter 11, Jesus says: come unto me all you who are weary, and I will give you rest.’
Paul Westmoreland, in his second published book, includes a reference to these words and the burdens people carry form a large and significant part of the narrative.
The principal male character is the Rev. James Rayburn, Rector of St. Luke’s, an Anglican church situated in a busy part of town close to the ’Old Quarter’ where several of the characters in the story live.

James’ burden is his evident and growing doubt about his own faith; a situation seemingly made worse by the challenge to it presented by the events he becomes embroiled in as we follow the narrative in the week before Christmas. 

The main female character is Hannah, known as Corrie (short for Corrigan) who turns up on the Vicar’s doorstep and her burden is both a literal and metaphorical one, consisting of a mysterious ‘bundle’ which her mother Fran has entrusted to her and insisted that she take to James, ‘the one good man I know’ with whom Fran once had a relationship.

The story progresses with Corrie at its centre and explores the links between her and the other principal characters. There is Kate Raynor, unhappily married to Dave and whose family attend St. Luke’s on an intermittent basis (although Kate herself, is not a churchgoer). Very early on in the story Kate comes across Corrie in the Golden Road area as she seeks the house of Grant Napier, a colleague she has fallen for and for whom she has written a card she wants to deliver. Corrie, still on the way to the Vicarage, out of kindness attempts to return a file that Kate has dropped. Kate thinks Corrie has taken the card she intended for Grant out of this file and behaves rather aggressively towards her. 

Then there is the Dowling family. Stella Dowling is Kate’s younger friend and colleague, who also fancies the handsome Grant. The link between the Dowlings and Corrie begins when Corrie, still trying to find the Vicarage, rescues Anna, the youngest of the Dowling children from a dog which attacks them both in the street. It develops when Corrie hides her ‘bundle’ in an old coke bunker which Anna claims as her ‘secret place’. Anna’s brother, Richard, discovers the mysterious ‘bundle’… 

It would be churlish and disrespectful to those who have yet to read the book to reveal details of how the plot develops from this point onwards. Suffice it to say that the contents of the mysterious ‘bundle’ have consequences for all the main participants – not least for Corrie and the Rev. James Rayburn. As the events unfold, we meet Gavin Dale and Phil Ryan, who help out at the hostel, a project in which the Rev. Rayburn has invested much time and energy; Emma West, the Vicar’s housekeeper and Joan Miller frantically engaged in rehearsing the panto to be performed at the theatre once housed in the church hall next to St. Luke’s; Dr Peter Reeve a local GP and Jon Steele a former young offender who also comes into contact with Corrie on her travels. But who are the mysterious men pursuing Corrie and, above all, who is ‘Standerd’ whose idiosyncratic name fills Corrie with dread?

As with Paul Westmoreland’s previous novel, ‘Raineland’, the reader is aware that he or she is in the hands of a storyteller of considerable skill and invention and though Christmas Night begins rather slowly, there is considerable pleasure in finding out what happens to these characters and how they cope with what is thrust upon them. Once again, as in his previous novel, Paul Westmoreland seems more ‘at home’ inhabiting the minds of his female characters who tend to be the lead players in the drama.

There are two themes in the book which would repay further discussion or elaboration.
In the first place, we are given only a brief understanding of James Rayburn’s struggle with his faith- ‘this darkness that has settled on my soul’. How does he arrive at this position and are there any particular ways in which the events of this ‘Christmas Night’ bring any real sense of resolution to his doubts? This is a well-trodden theme in literature – for example The Brothers Karamazov enters deeply into the ethical debate of God, free will and morality or in Mrs Gaskell’s North and South, Mr Hale’s crisis of faith which leads him to leave the church.

Secondly, the church in the 21st century finds its attendance figures continuing to decline but, paradoxically, it is at the forefront of ways to address the needs of the poor and disadvantaged in society when what the State can provide is limited by lack of funds and the desperate attempt to ‘juggle’ the competing needs of one government department over another. It would have been interesting to know something of James Rayburn’s ‘take’ on all this, given that St. Luke’s is an urban parish and its vicar is clearly in the ‘front line’ in dealing with poverty and deprivation of one kind or another. Perhaps James’ crise de conscience and need to discover, in the words of Hebrews chapter 11,” the ‘substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen” might be eased by the work in which he is intimately engaged?
Paul Westmoreland is to be congratulated on having written an engaging and atmospheric novel which can only enhance his burgeoning reputation.

Nick Lloyd January 2020