Courting Shadows by Jem Poster

Architect meets match among village people

If you have ever been stuck in some rural hell-hole, with surly locals and a grotty pub that makes you long for the hygienic charms of Gatwick Village, you will sympathise with the narrator of this atmospheric novel set in the Victorian countryside. John Stannard is a young architect who travels to a remote village to supervise the "restoration" of the church, determined to demolish any unsound and insanitary elements in the ancient jumble of Norman and Gothic stones. In the process, he violates local customs.

Out with the rotten pews! Off with a pagan fertility carving! As for the long-buried dead, Stannard shows little respect for their bones. He treats a coffin held in veneration by the locals with ominous contempt, forcing his reluctant workmen to desecrate it.

The parishioners are greatly exercised by the newcomer's determination to have a good clear-out of superstitious relics. At first, he casts their objections aside, although the vicar tries to restrain him. Stannard gets permission from higher ecclesiastical authority and insists on going ahead. However, a beautiful village girl materialises and gradually the architect's rigid morality is compromised as she, the landscape and the villagers entrap him in the depths of winter.

He undertakes to destroy the medieval "Doom" carving with his own hands, and suffers serious injury and illness. A blundering outsider unwittingly entangled in a web of relationships stretching from squire to tavern low-life, he is eventually caught up in a death which shocks even his apparently rational soul.

Jem Poster has worked as an archaeologist, and his understanding of the physical fabric of a church gives this book solidity. He has also managed to create a central character who is deeply unpleasant – Stannard treats his workmen with Dickensian heartlessness – yet with whom the reader can feel some sympathy. It is fascinating to watch the slow growth of awareness in this callow young man.

This is a satisfyingly creepy village, full of implied threats against the outsider. Even the love affair in which he becomes enmeshed bodes ill. It's also a parable of man against nature: as Stannard puts it: "The buildings we construct, the monuments whose upkeep we undertake on behalf of our predecessors, are under permanent siege. Frost and rain, these beetles, the fungus eating away at the base here, mosses, lichens, stonecrop, the force of gravity itself – they're all in league against us."

What distinguishes the book is not so much the plot but the imagination and prose, comparable to Michel Faber's work in its evocative quality. Poster is a newcomer to fiction, but he has a track record as a poet, and this book is beautifully written, full of precision and intensity.

Odd scraps linger – haunting glimpses of figures seen from a passing train, the village story of the mermaid baby mewing like a kitten in a pail. The author's poetic sense of texture, smell and colour in the depths of the countryside more than compensate for the rather predictable story.

The reviewer's new novel 'In the Kingdom of Mists' is published by Doubleday