The Hermitage

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? The Hermitage is a work etched on the timbrous membrane between soul and world, memory and perception. The result is disquieting music, a kind of dirge for all that’s been lost and may never return. No one alive writes like Quentin S. Crisp. JF Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice This gently, precisely written tale is of an experience of vitality that is, at once, clearly felt and yet out of reach. Crisp raises one of the great questions of our age: How to participate in life beyond the confines of our isolated psyches? It does not provide direct answers; sometimes to know one’s predicament is a first step towards change. Mark Vernon, author of A Secret History of Christianity The Hermitage is thought-provoking and beautifully written, a meditation on a partly remembered, perhaps partly imagined place of refuge from the world. Crisp is one of the most beguiling, accomplished, and enjoyable writers of our generation. R. B. Russell, author of Waiting for the End of the World