Customer Reviews

The Dean's Watch

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This novel takes place in a remote Cathedral city in England; the reader is drawn into various peoples'lives, central among them the Dean of the Cathedral. It is the story of the way that this humble man, who is unaware of the impact of his simple love for God and his fellow man, deeply affects many in his city. It is a beautifully told story of the healing power of love. Highly recommended.

...I became enchanted by the tale Goudge tells. The setting for the story is a cathedral city in the fens. The city is populated with charmingly depicted characters that ooze quaintness from every pore. The main character is the old Dean, known in the town as a fierce and relentless man due to his hunting down of the city's corruption. And yet, the Dean is a misunderstood man. His love and fidelity are often met with indifference in the town, and this is even more true of his own wife who is deterred by his ugliness and who finds his devotion to her repulsive. Yet help is at hand, for the Dean owns a beautiful watch: a watch that becomes the starting point for a new friendship for the Dean, and new hope.

Goudge's tale is clearly Christian in content. It is a tale of redemption, grace and love in a world of ugliness and pain. It is never, I think crass, and retains a note of ambiguity to the end, which is appropriate to her theme. Readers will find that something of this story can speak to them if they let it, and indeed, I suspect it speaks to Everyman. Yet it is never moralistic, didactic or triumphalist: often the worst sins of the Christian novel.

A lovely tale, with enough depth to grasp sceptical readers like myself.

This is my favorite Elizabeth Goudge book. I read this every December before the Christmas holidays. This is a very well-written story about people in a small English cathedral village thrown together by a humble clockmaker. Lives are being changed and we are told how and why. It's a gentle story, and told with much insight into human behavior.

Elizabeth Goudge is a fine writer. Her language is rich as butter. All of her stories are interesting, but this one is beautiful. I believe that, after all the books I have read in my rather long life, books of all manner of styles and genres, this book is the deepest and best. Her characterizations are strong and complex, her consideration of the human state both honest and compassionate. There is great affection for humanity, even in her most honest and grieving portrayal of it. Beautiful writing, strong story, interesting and provoking characters - I enjoy so much the honor of spending a few hours with this woman and the depth of her faith, courage and love.

My favorite by Goudge, by far. She takes you there on a flying carpet of words so that you can see, smell and hear, visiting the homes and lives of the rich and weak, the poor and strong, the bitter, the loving, the young, the old, and helpless. Central to it all is the Dean of the Cathedral, only now in his last year is he being truly changed under God's hand. And his "watch" is a timepiece, but also his alloted time on duty. Interesting things happen during his watch!

There are characters we love, rejoice with, sigh for, and laugh at. We see the joy of a little girl receiving a gift of a parasol (though the Dean's joy in giving it exceeds her joy in receiving). But his wife, who has greater riches, does not rejoice in what she receives.

Though non-Anglicans may need a bit of help with certain terms and concepts, grab the book and enjoy. Then share it with a friend, while you run off to get Goudge's Green Dolphin Street.

Elizabeth Gouge is one of the finest wordsmiths I have ever read. Her stories are gentle, compassionate - showing her abiding compassion for human kind, with our flaws and our nobility equally recognized. A woman of faith, she weaves a magic through her tales--a twisting of earthly realities with spiritual mysteries, and she denies any limits on reality, knowing that there is more to this world, and to our being in it, than the "reality" many people insist on defining. There is humility in her work, but tremendous greatness. And her writing is as lovely as a Japanese ink drawing - deft, smooth, simple, evocative. She can handle a sentence like nobody else in the world--words sweet and rich as butter, a complete pleasure to run through the mind and the imagination. I wish she were still alive and I could write to her. I wish I could know her better. I'd love to hear what she might have to say about quite a few things, these days. This is my favorite book in all the world. That's the greatest praise I can offer.

The setting for the story is a cathedral city in the fens. The city is populated with charmingly depicted characters that ooze quaintness from every pore. The main character is the old Dean, known in the town as a fierce and relentless man due to his hunting down of the city's corruption. And yet, the Dean is a misunderstood man. His love and fidelity are often met with indifference in the town, and this is even more true of his own wife who is deterred by his ugliness and who finds his devotion to her repulsive. Yet help is at hand, for the Dean owns a beautiful watch: a watch that becomes the starting point for a new friendship for the Dean, and new hope.

One of Goudge's last novels, The Dean's Watch, also exemplifies her view of life.
Set during the 1870s in an unnamed English fen city, whose heart is a medieval cathedral, it tells what happens when an old clock-maker, Isaac Peabody, mistakenly places a printed motto in the antique pocket watch of the grim cathedral Dean, Adam Ayscough, and subsequently meets the Dean.
Isaac is a tradesman and an atheist, brutalised by the hell-fire faith of his father who had been a Church of England priest in one of the city's churches. He is terrified of the cathedral itself, and would never dare presume to speak with such an elevated member of the gentry as the Dean.
Yet, a man of profound faith, and enormous compassion for the suffering poor, the Dean is himself emotionally crippled by shyness. He is as lonely, and as isolated in his marriage to his unloving wife, as Isaac is in the household he shares with his sister, who is embittered by self-sacrificing spinsterdom and her shame for the Peabodys' descent from the professional ranks of clergy-gentry to working class tradespeople.

Many other characters are pulled into the events of a few months; two teenage lovers, a near-decrepit elderly parish priest, a three-year old girl, a brutal fishmonger, and a woman in her eighties who lives amongst her fellow townsfolk as a kind of unrecognised saint.
Goudge also does not hesitate (neither does Victor Hugo) to throw in vigorous chapters of cathedral and town history, and many flashbacks and reminiscences of the earlier years of her characters. The book is packed with incident, character, and landscape, despite its immediate action being comparatively slight and covering a short span of present narrative time.

Of course, like all of Goudge's books, it is heart-warming. But it pulls no punches.
Goudge writes about the hard gritty stuff of real people, complex, flawed and contradictory in a real world of hope, pain, accident, evil and suffering, cherishing the flashes of goodness which can be achieved by human love. The earth closets (one-holers, lavatories) in the slum backyards stink. Young children are forced by brutal masters to climb inside and sweep chimneys. People hate, or love, as their mood leads them, and often do violent things. Senility descends on the extreme elderly. The stormy autumnal tone grows from the book's references to Shakespeare's sonnets and King Lear and A Winter's Tale, to John Donne's sermons and the organ music of Bach, to the callous violence of the Norman Conquests, Henry VIII's brutal dissolution of the monasteries, and Cromwell's puritan destruction of the rich fabric of the ancient church.

In such a dark world the creation of mechanically intricate and faithful watches and clocks, decorated lovingly with charming filigree or Dresden figurines or secret illuminated manuscripts, stands as a covert metaphor of the highest to which humans can aspire. At the same time the ticking of a watch and its sheer mechanical longevity stand as implicit reminders of the mortality of its maker, who labours to make the watch despite foreknowledge of his own death. (In our unthinking age of throw-away mass-produced digital watches Goudge's novel offers fundamental, old-fashioned values we do well to remember.)

Even the title means different significant things: the actual heirloom watch, which triggers the story; the Dean's "ticker" or heart, which physically beats uncertainly, yet passionately loves behind the shyness; the Deans' "watch", as a navy term, in which he faithfully steers the ship of the city and cares for her people.

All of Goudge's novels are "romances" in one important aspect: they hinge on moments of visionary insight for her characters, filled with that romantic longing for a strange beauty and joy which is known in German as "Sehnsucht". Dreams, glimpses of landscape, moments of weather, the sound of a voice or melody when no one else is present, sudden remembering of lost experience, or a poetry quote which stabs to the heart. These are frequently counterbalanced against moments of evil, terror, despair, emotional collapse, irrational rage or blinding hate. Most of her central characters are well educated and intellectually or emotionally gifted, although many are presented as frail, absent-minded, wounded. Yet not only are they bound up in everyday tasks, they are surrounded by salt-of-the-earth uneducated workers, heroic peasants comparable to the subjects of Hopkins' poems "Felix Randall", "Tom" and "Harry Ploughman", people of utter reliability and ancient Hardyesque virtue. Her characters' ages may vary from eighty to eight, or even younger. For Goudge there is little difference between adult and child except length of experience and acquired knowledge - their interests, emotions and needs are fundamentally the same. In some cases the children show greater maturity than the so called "adults", and even the animals, dogs particularly, owned by her characters show unspoken wisdom which may ironically exceed that of their masters and mistresses.

John Gough -- Deakin University -- jagough49@gmail.com

I love this book. It helps that it's set in Ely, a breathtaking place (though she never actually names it, and changes some details, Goudge did confirm that the unnamed city is Ely). The author clearly loves her characters, even the somewhat difficult to love ones. The setting is beautifully described. And when she wants to insert historical details, she just puts them in using her authorial voice, rather than trying to force them into a character's voice.

There's a nice balance of sad and joyous, serious and amusing. The sadness is what might be called "beautiful sad", as opposed to "ugly sad".

A delightful book to sink into, like a warm and inviting armchair by the fire.

and I think perhaps she may be right, with the exception, perhaps, of The Little White Horse. There was a poetic, magical quality about Elizabeth Goudge's writing. I always imagined I could SMELL the English countryside when reading one of her books--which is particularly amazing considering that I don't have much sense of smell to start with!

Since I wrote the above (in October 1999) the whole world has come to know that The Little White Horse is Joanne Rowling's favourite book, so I guess it's now "no contest" as to which book Goudge will be most remembered by. In some respects, that's a shame.