The Hermitage: Verdurin

From the delightfully idiosyncratic imagination of Quentin S. Crisp comes an exquisite post-pastoral novella about an encounter with mystery. The Hermitage is the story of a secret half-revealed, an epiphany half-realized. Join the narrator as he pursues a chimera from the green heart of England to the grey modernity of urban sprawl.

A young man's solitary pilgrimage to a tiny West Country church, a journey ostensibly inspired by the literary figure Sabine Baring-Gould, eccentric librettist of Onward Christian Soldiers, turns into a semi-mystical experience when the pilgrim, responding to some obscure prompting of the soul, stops at the old sacristy, now known as the Hermitage.

Here he learns something of the long history of the church and of its strange revival after years of desertion and ruin. More significantly, he learns of the troubled, yet obscurely fulfilled life of Old Mazy Parkin, who acts as sacristan, and how the homeless tramp became a hermit.

Many years later, living next to a busy T-Junction, inured to the hum of electrical devices and the incessant wailing of sirens, the narrator reflects on how the pilgrimage shaped his expectations and on the course his life has since taken. What was the meaning of the silence that Mazy Parkin faced but that he, the pilgrim, could not?