Published: 2003
Author: Phil Rickman
Over-long, but has potential
I’m always looking for a bargain, particularly when it comes to books so I was excited when I spotted the thick Phil Rickman novel The Wine of Angels 
Merrily Watkins is a widowed vicar, leaving her inner-city parish in Liverpool to take up the position of Priest-in-Charge in the rural Herefordshire parish of Ledwardine. Merrily faces discrimination from villagers who are suspicious of females in the clergy, a missing girl, mysterious deaths and the exposure of a shameful incident in the area’s history when one of Merrily’s predecessors was accused of witchcraft and subsequently committed suicide. The arrival of the new vicar turns the area on its head and long-hidden secrets are uncovered.
It’s now a few days since I finished The Wine of Angels and I’m still not sure if I liked it or not. Some passages gripped me and I was hooked, but then the chapter finished and the action slowed down again and I lost my interest. By the end of the novel I was speed-reading the last 20 or so pages just so that I could finish the story and get onto something much more interesting. It didn’t hold me as much as I had so wanted it to, but at the same time I didn’t dislike it. And given the second installment of the Merrily Watkins series, Midwinter of the Spirit 
So what exactly is my problem with The Wine of Angels? I was pondering it and listening to a Mark Kermode podcast when the wise man himself said “If you shake a film, twenty-five minutes will fall out” and immediately I knew the issue. Someone needed to shake this book and 150 or so pages would fall out. The story was decent enough but it was just too wordy, ponderous and took too long for anything to happen. An editor with a big red pen was required to go through the book and remove all the wittering, extraneous dialogue and unwanted sub-plots. The Wine of Angels isn’t bad, but it isn’t as good as it could or should be.
Merrily herself is an attractive character. She’s smart, funny and real. She has worries about her job, her daughter and her non-existent love life. As a female reader of (roughly) the same age as Merrily, I found her likeable and appealing. Her daughter Jane is that very rare thing in fiction – a well-rounded teenager. She drinks, has issues with her mother, can be moody but is also quite a nice girl, her character has plenty of room for development. And that’s what the whole saga needs – some development.
The Wine of Angels is the first book in a series which has so far reached 8 parts and this episode feels very much like an introduction rather than a fully-rounded piece of work. I hope the series gets better, I hope the supernatural element touched on briefly comes to the forefront of the story. I’m sure at some point I’ll give the franchise a second chance, but if Midwinter of the Spirit doesn’t grip immediately then I’ll have no problem at all moving quickly on to something else.