Book review: The Road to Grantchester, by James Runcie

James Runcie’s first Grantchester novels featuring Sidney Chambers, the Anglican priest who dabbles or more than dabbles in detection, seemed charming and offered an agreeable contrast to much contemporary crime writing with its gruesome murders and scientific investigations. Runcie himself once remarked that the books were more like John Mortimer’s Rumpole stories than most modern crime novels.

Certainly the Rev Sidney Chambers is a long way from John Rebus. Nevertheless, the appearance of cosiness is deceptive. These are serious novels, novels in which murder and other crimes aren’t offered as mere entertainment. Runcie has a light touch and a sense of humour, but he is also a moralist. Indeed, he has said that the six Grantchester novels “are intended as a moral history of post-war Britain.”

As the title indicates, this new novel is a prequel, telling how Chambers became a priest and the vicar of Grantchester. The first half will surprise many who have enjoyed the previous novels and the TV series. There is nothing cosy about it at all. The young Sidney Chambers is a captain in the Scots Guards, engaged in the Italian campaign and in the terrible battle of Monte Cassino. Some have regarded the Italian campaign as a sideshow. It was anything but that. The fighting was ferocious and terrible. Churchill’s “soft belly of the Axis” was far from soft. Runcie re-creates the fighting in all its horror, while recognising moments of tenderness, the importance of friendship and the paradoxical challenge which war offers to men with religious faith – not that the young Sidney Chambers has that yet. This war section is good enough to merit comparison with the Italian (and Korean) scenes in Eric Linklater’s great novel, The Dark of Summer.