The Priest’s Wife (The Isle Fincara Trilogy, 2)
Set on a fictional island between Ireland and Scotland sometime ‘early in the second millennium’, this series (this is Book Two) qualifies as historical fantasy but nonetheless reflects real historical tensions. When Morag’s husband Hugh, the parish priest, dies, her adopted son Dhion—a time-traveller from the future introduced in Book One, The Seaborne—his wife Shinane, and the other villagers help her with her loss. Shinane is carrying new life: twins.
Having lost her husband, Morag will have to vacate the priest’s house. She feels she has lost her place in the island’s society and even feels alienated from her new grandchildren. She travels to Kimmoil, her birthplace two days north, to discover the identity of her own mother and embarks on a spiritual awakening.
Her welcome in Kimmoil is less than warm; the town is suffering from an outbreak of scurvy. She meets the daughter of her half-brother, Sorcha, as unloved as she had been, and brings her back with her. After Hugh’s death, the villagers look to Morag for pastoral and ritual care, but when the new priest, Aidan, arrives, he tries to pull the parish away from their traditional druidic beliefs and customs, now deemed heretical, and butts heads with the shareg (headman).
The novel is beautifully written and evocative of the culture of the time; no anachronistic language intrudes upon the beautiful picture. This is a misty, green world, where the Otherworld of the Sidhe is not so distant from life among the living. A doctor, crofter and ordained minister himself, Rivett understands the tight relationship of the peasants with the land and the seasons and their religious ideas and practices. The contrast between the ‘nature-affirming’ Celtic faith and the ‘nature-denying’ Catholic is very much part of the dynamic between Aidan and Morag.
