In the autumn of 1140 the Benedictine monastery at Shrewsbury finds its new novice Meriet Aspley a bit disturbing. The younger son of a prominent family, Meriet is meek and biddable by day, but his sleep is rife with nightmares so violent that they earn him the name of “Devil’s Novice”. Shunned by the other monks, Aspley attracts the concern of Brother Cadfael. Then a body appears, that of a young priest last seen at the Aspley estate. Can Meriet be involved in the death? As events take a sinister turn, it falls to Brother Cadfael to detect the truth.

It’s been thirty-five years since I read a Cadfael book. I started with ‘The Leper Of Saint Giles’ in 1985, then read ‘The Virgin in the Ice‘ in 1987 and finished with ‘The Rose Rent‘ in 1989. Now that Cadfael and I are of an age, I thought it might be interesting to see whether the books still appeal to me.

The wise thing to have dones would have been to ask friends to recommend the best book and the best narrator to use to re-enter the series. 

Unfortunately, I was not wise. I picked the first Cadfael audiobook that Audible offered me for free as part of my membership and found myself listening to an audiobook version of ‘The Devil’s Novice‘ that was released in 2000. 

It was a disappointing listen. The first shock was how poor the production standards were. The sound level kept dropping every time the narrator moved from dialogue to prose, making it hard to listen without constantly adjusting the volume. The choice of narrator was also a problem. Vanessa Benjamin was fine at the prose parts (once I turned up the volume so that I could hear her) but she had a very limited number of male voices available and a few of them were quite shouty. As all but two of the characters who get to say anything were male, this became annoying. Hugh Beringar was given a deep and loud voice that allowed for no subtlety and it was sometimes difficult to tell him and Cadfael apart. 

The narration also made me more critical of the text. I became aware that much of the dialogue seemed to be people making ‘this is what we know so far’ speaches at each other that went on, often repeated themselves and were full of ‘olde-worlde’ English that didn’t ring true. which was suprising given that Ellis Peters was a linguist.

Some of the plot worked quite well but the pacing was uneven and the wrap-up after the big reveal seemed to go on forever.

So, I definitely picked the wrong audiobook.

Still, it did whet my appetite for Cadfael so I took advice and bought an omnibus of six Cadfael novels narrated by Derek Jacobi. I’ll be dipping into throughout 2024.