In the wink of an eye, as quick as a flea,
The Devil he jumped from me to thee.
And only when the Devil had gone,
Did I know that he and I’d been one …
Every autumn, John Pentecost returns to the farm where he grew up, to help gather the sheep down from the moors for the winter. Very little changes in the Endlands, but this year, his grandfather—the Gaffer—has died and John’s new wife, Katherine, is accompanying him for the first time.
Each year, the Gaffer would redraw the boundary lines of the village, with pen and paper but also through the remembrance of tales and timeless communal rituals, which keep the sheep safe from the Devil. But as the farmers of the Endlands bury the Gaffer and prepare to gather the sheep, they begin to wonder whether they’ve let the Devil in after all.
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“This is a story with pull. Its lively, building sense of evil is thoroughly entangled with the assumptions of the way of life depicted, that apparently timeless relationship of the smallholder and the moor. As the young Adam soaks up his father’s tales of the Devil, he’s also learning how to manage the local landscape, how to live in, identify with and take responsibility for the Endlands. These two types of knowledge, the symbolic and the practical, are presented as distinct but interdependent…The devil flickers and dances in the woods, and John Pentecost’s self-deceptions are bared for the reader in a horrific climax.”
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Guardian (London)