There’s probably not much to be added to the story of The Wicker Man but let's take a trip back in time, to the original source – a little novella called Ritual, written by stage-actor David Pinner and published in 1967.
The book that birthed The Wicker Man - kind of...
If you’re not that interested in the history of the thing, feel free to skip to the synopsis section below…
David Pinner was no total unknown when he wrote Ritual, since he was playing the role of lead detective in Agatha Christie’s famously twisty-turny murder-mystery play The Mousetrap. Neither was he a household name, though he was certainly famous enough to be recognized by London's theater-going middle-classes.
He was a youthful 26 years of age and, beside acting, he was branching into playwriting.
Ritual was not his first theater script (he’d already staged a lesbian vampire comedy – Fanghorn – and was writing a trilogy of the things), but neither was Ritual really a “play”. Film director Michael Winner, then known for his comedies and near a decade away from making Death Wish, had optioned Pinner's as-yet-unwritten piece for script treatment. It seemed like a good offer, but Pinner's agent was concerned that Winner’s rising stature might mean he'd do other projects first and leave the Ritual script in limbo. He recommended Pinner's script be worked into a novel for immediate sale.
Pinner churned out the novel in just eight weeks. Large chunks of it were written on the London Underground, during travel back-and-forth to Mousetrap showings. It was published a few months later. The theatrical script, if it exists, doesn't appear to have been released.
The story of Ritual being turned (or more accurately "not turned") into The Wicker Man is pretty well know, but for those who don't know this is probably a good a place as any to summarize it.
Around 1971, famed horror actor Christopher Lee was growing tired of being in Hammer Horror films. The company appeared to be on its last legs, and with risible dreck like Scars of Dracula and lesbian-vampire-gore-fest Lust for a Vampire comprising its last few years' productions, it was perhaps unsurprising the gravel-voiced thespian sought something with a little more (ahem) bite.
By chance Lee was introduced to screenwriter Anthony Shaffer, a rising star, though something of an unknown quantity. He'd just written Hitchcock’s Frenzy – a rather anemic, if critically popular, serial-killer flick with comic undertones.
The two apparently hit it off. Shaffer had just read Ritual, and raised the idea of Lee and director Robin Hardy doing it as a project. Shaffer and Hardy began work on rewriting it for the screen. Allegations they ripped off Pinner’s novel without crediting him seem to be untrue; the author reports being paid a tidy £15,000 for the privilege (something akin to $250,000 in 2020).
Later in his career Shaffer would become known for his detective pieces (alongside penning Hitchcock thrillers he’d also script Agatha Christie movies – thereby bringing the Pinner-in-Mousetrap-Shaffer-writes-Mousetrap-theatre-to-cinema loop full-circle). Though Ritual is definitely a darkly Gothic satire masquerading as a detective story, Shaffer and Hardy did not use a lot of that in their Wicker Man adaptation.
And while Ritual is, by turns, a comedy, the movie adaptation is not particularly funny. The few laughs that do slip out are predominantly found in bawdy songs, Christopher Lee's dapper heresy, and the tips and winks to its protagonist’s religious arrogance. But even then it’s hard to keep laughing at Howie’s earnest, if misplaced, scruples as the sun sets on the final reel.
According to the screenwriters, Lee showed a particular interest in the Pagan aspects of the story (he was, said one, one of the few people who knew what a wicker man actually was before even reading the script) and he was vocal in keeping the Christian/Pagan rivalry in the story. Lee himself, mind you, was no stranger to the dark arts. Despite playing myriad monsters on screen, he was also quite open about warning people not to mess about with magic and Satanism in real life, lest one calls something up.
By the end of the rewrites only a few core elements found their way from book to movie, more as conceits than specifics (Shafer, perhaps diplomatically, would say he couldn't work out how to give it a direct adaptation – anyone who's read the novel would surely agree).
Instead of the film's disappearance of a young girl on a rugged and starkly working-class Scottish island, in Ritual our "hero" Detective Sergeant David Hanlin instead visits a middle-class, "olde-worlde English" Cornish village on an investigation into the apparent ritual murder of a child.
Hanlin is not the puritanical and uniformed Sergeant Howie of the movie, but a sunglasses-wearing, sneering city-boy with an "Oliver Cromwell" complex and a fine line in fisticuffs against men, women and children. His religiosity is worn on his sleeve but only skin deep. It's the hypocrisy of a man who secretly enjoys his sins but is embarrassed by them, prefering they occur at night, far from prying eyes.
Stylistically, Ritual is the work of a young man. It’s unconventionally written, with a few neat witticisms and garlands of purple-prose. There's a lot of that kind of turgidly awkward turns of phrase you'd find in college creative-writing classes. Dialogue is often stilted – though I think deliberately so, despite some critics' claims at it being inept – and laced with the kind of rapid-fire patter you'd expect from a theater actor.
In fact, Pinner’s story is very much a "comedy" of the theater, all grand, sweeping emotions and grotesqueries, filled with caricatures and slapstick and puns. The flashes of clever wordplay are what you'd expect from early Pratchett or Douglas Adams.
As for the story...
Just before May Day, outside the village of Thorn in Cornwall, young Dian Spark dies next to an oak tree, a sprig of garlic in her hand. Her best friend, Gilly, claims she died from falling off a branch while climbing - but she tells no one about the sound of flute notes ringing in her ears or the monkey head and bats she saw nailed to the oak tree's bark.
Enter Detective Inspector David Hanlin, a youngish Special Branch officer whose scarred eyes leave him sunblind without sunglasses. According to him he's busted a string of witch-cults and Satanic sects across the UK, and he thinks the Thorn cases will prove a pushover. There are hints he may have been to the town before, perhaps even have known Dian Spark - but his real reasons for being involved in such cases boils down to the murder of the little girl who used to live next-door to him when he was a boy.
Masquerading as a tourist, Hanlin arrives in town by train and bumps into the village's practically feral children, who run wild under the leadership of bully Fat Billy. Fat Billy hated Dian - and hates outsiders too. Following a bout of sunblindness when he loses his sunglasses, Hanlin winds up in the cemetery, where he finds clues of an occult nature, including sprigs of garlic left on Dian’s grave.
Reverend White, the loquacious and irritating local man of God, insists the village is a Christian one – something Hanlin disagrees with upon finding the altar cross is missing, replaced by a monkey's head and garlic flowers. The rector is horrified by the find but directs Hanlin to the tree where Dian died, under the misapprehension the policeman is actually the girl's uncle.
Across town Dian's mother - the resident village witch - has turned the weekly Bible study club held in her attic into a séance. She hopes to talk with her dead daughter. Midway through the ritual she accuses the other townsfolk present of being involved in the death, sparking a run of accusation and counter-accusation. Everyone there knows Mrs. Spark is the only one present with real knowledge of the esoteric, or so they claim.
Dian's university-age sister, a sexually rapacious and attractive young woman named Anna, listens to the arguments through the keyhole, then decides now is a good time to take the village children on an unspecified but evidently Druidic yomp into the forest.
Meanwhile, Hanlin has been making his through those self-same woods to visit the murder tree. Instead of an enjoyable return to nature, however, he's attacked by the local wild-man – a hyper-sexual and stereotypically surly gypsy who goes by the name of Gypo (subtlety is not this book's strong suit). One brief fight later and Hanlin is frog-marching Gypo, forcing the subdued thug into leading him to the oak tree where Dian was found.
At the tree the monkey's head has returned, pinned to the bark alongside two bat wing. Gypo laughingly claims he stuck them there for fun.
At this point Anna arrives with the children, claiming her trip to the tree is part of a "butterfly funeral" for Dian. She is impressed and sexually aroused by the detective, who is impressed in turn when she kicks Gypo, her ex-lover, in the balls for making unwanted advances toward her. Leaving Gypo prostrate, she seductively invites Hanlin to come home with her. There are no hotels in town, she explains, but he could share her bed.
Back at the seance, which has failed, the conveners argue again. Mrs. Spark angrily threatens to call out-of-town police in to investigate the death. The townsfolk are appalled that she might threaten the upcoming May Day festival by having outsiders in to tramp around. Realizing she may have gone too far, Mrs. Spark says her threat wasn't real and she'd never think of bringing in outsiders.
Unfortunately for her, it's right at this point Hanlin arrives with Anna, the latter explaining to the group that he's a detective. She then offers him lodgings in her dead sister’s room (!). The townsfolk, thinking Spark has brought in the policeman, end the session, snidely insult Hanlin and head home.
Anna's seduction of Hanlin fails and that night she is forced to rebutt Gypo (who comically tries to climb through her window for a bit of rumpy-pumpy). Very much turned on, Anna again tries to seduce Hanlin via the infamous, "through-the-wall strip-tease" that made 1973's movie adaptation such pleasant viewing. Hanlin uses all his strength to withstand Anna's sexual advances, so the young woman instead decides to sneak out and take the village children on a late night reverie, back to the old oak tree.
Here the kids press themselves against its bark in a hallucinatory nature-rite, witnessing images of butterflies. It is hinted that butterflies, tied to rebirth, may in fact be the reincarnated Dian.
Fat Billy, having hated Dian, has a jolly time squashing any butterflies he sees - something the other children chastise him violently for at various points in the novel. In fact, Billy's control over the group seems to be only by consent rather than his own power. He seems honestly scared of them sometimes.
The following day, Hanlin wakes and tries to interrogate the village’s varied stereotypes. First is the Squire, whose claims to musical incompetence fall on deaf ears, for his fluting is disturbingly good and unsettlingly Lovecraftian. Like the rector, the riddlesome Squire talks in circles, but recommends the detective speak with Lawrence Cready, camp ex-actor and dabbler in the occult.
Wealthy Cready has turned the local mansion into a museum of demonology, though it transpires all his grimoires and altars are fake. Nevertheless, he has a disturbing interest in the local children – as well as photographs of a “dead” Dian taken months earlier. It was part of a “game” he plays with the kids, he tells Hanlin. The blood is jam.
On the mansion grounds the children visit creepy Cready for archery lessons, but Hanlin’s bully-boy browbeating of the kids over Dian's death pushes an angry Fat Billy into attacking him. From the boy’s pocket falls a doll with a large pin stuck through it. "Dian" is written across its back.
Hanlin gives Fat Billy a thrashing and accuses him of murdering the girl, but while Fat Billy admits to hating Dian and claims both her and her mother were witches who haunted the children’s dreams, he denies the crime and runs off. Hanlin gives chase only to lose his pudgy suspect in the woods. He suffers another bout of sunblindness.
With the whole town turned against Mrs Spark, the witch holds a public hypnosis session on Gilly, hoping to prove her belief that a murderer lurks among the townsfolk. But Gilly, even under hypnosis, stands firm that Dian died in an accidental fall.
It would seem there was no murder - at least until Fat Billy is found dead at the base of the same tree where Dian died. The needle from his voodoo doll has been driven through his ear and into his brain.
Arriving on the scene, Hanlin devises a convoluted ruse to try to uncover the killer. He claims Billy is still alive and merely injured (for only the murderer also knows he's truly dead). He anonymously tips off Anna, hoping her panic might prove her guilt or lead her to the real culprit. Instead, no one in town believes her claims Billy's not breathing. It's another dead-end, just like pretty much everything else in the book. Hanlin calls in a police surgeon to do an autopsy on Billy's body but the results, again, show no sign of occultism.
While resting in Dian's bedroom, thinking of Anna's shapely curves, Hanlin receives a letter from Cready, inviting him to a moon worshipping ceremony at the mansion. He claims he has clues to offer. Our heroic detective, despite his staunch belief it's a trick, does as requested. At the mansion he finds Cready and his manservant dressed as women in an apparent attempt to seduce him.
Much homoerotic banter occurs as the two transvestites enact a Pagan fire ritual. Hanlin starts to fear that his arousal is proof Cready has some mesmeric sexual power. Or perhaps the detective just doesn't want to admit he might be a bit gay.
Meanwhile, in town the villagers are dressed as animals and in Pagan dress. To the Squire's music they march down to the beach, where they light a bonfire and sacrifice a horse and a keg of beer to the ocean. A bisexual orgy follows. Up at the mansion Hanlin sees the burning braziers by the water and realizes he’s been tricked. Cready laughingly tells the detective neither he nor his manservant are gay and were only acting as a decoy. In anger, Hanlin rushes to the nightsurf, catching the village in flagrante coitus.
Only Gypo is not present. Hysterical accusations of the town's bestial nature fall on deaf ears as Hanlin realizes he’s been played. Far from the great detective he thinks he is, everyone has lied to him, mocked him, run rings around him. What they're doing isn't illegal, they point out. If anything it's perfectly natural.
Dejectedly, our defeated detective stalks back to his room, which he finds ransacked - and the needle that killed Billy planted among his belongings. A flirtatious Anna drops by to seduce him but he's not having it: the town, the lies, the fact she could be the murderer, reach boiling-point. In a white haze he beats the living snot out of her, breaking her nose.
Thrown out of the house, he approaches the local police (who, after confessing they knew of the town's Paganism and fear it, offer him a cell to sleep in). Hanlin snaps; he phones his superiors to send in a Special Branch team to round-up everyone, send in dogs, break out the thumbscrews. He's going to resign, anyway - this has been his last case.
He wakes the next morning, having broken into and slept in the church. The village children rush up and down the pews. Without Fat Billy they seem kinder, but one of them gleefully steals his sunglasses. In a blind panic, unable to see, he almost chokes one of the girls to get them back.
He apologizes and has a sudden leap-of-non-logic that Gilly - who is not present - must have stolen the cross earlier to give to the murder cult for their Satanic rituals. The children lead him to her, but in his haste he trips and falls. The kids vanish. He sits and awaits the arrival of the police raid, but in a momentary flash decides Gypo must be the killer - he is an outsider, oversexed, and apparently hates the villagers. In some ways, we shall soon realize, he is more correct than he knows.
Out of the trees comes the woodsman, armed with a bow. Hanlin threatens to arrest him, accuses him of murder, but Gypo laughs - his rustic accent gone, replaced with an educated brogue - and he tells Hanlin only two people saw Fat Billy die and know who the murderer is: Gypo and Hanlin himself. Gypo shoots the detective with an arrow, enough to wound but not kill, and they struggle, grappling, blood everywhere. Hanlin blacks out.
He wakes in the woods. Gypo is dead - pinned to a tree by an arrow - and as he looks at the corpse the police arrive, with dogs. Around the village, detectives round up villagers under accusations of sexual impropriety, prostitution, bestiality, anything that can drag them in for questioning.
Hanlin realizes that only an archer could have killed Gypo, and the only archers are up at Cready's mansion, where he saw the children practicing. He races up there but finds that, instead of just Cready, all the main villagers are there: Cready, the Squire, the Reverend and Anna, all engaged in archery.
Accusing them all of being murderers, telling them the police will be here soon with dogs, he grabs Anna and leads her away to the beach. She may not have killed the two children, he says, but he knows she killed Gypo. She killed him because he knew who the true killers are. Anna says that she would have killed him because he was attacking someone she loved.
On the beach they stop. She kisses him. From the sand-dune the feral children watch. Anna takes off Hanlin's glasses and they make love. When they are finished she lays there on the dune as Hanlin walks off to find a policemen.
Cut to a hospital. David is having his injuries bandaged, his superiors listening intently as he explains the case. But there's one thing he doesn't understand; he remembers kissing Anna, them sliding to the sand, and then him finding the policeman. But when he and the constable returned to the dune, someone had stabbed Anna dead with a paper-knife through her ear. A death much like Fat Billy's.
Who killed Anna, he asks?
Hanlin's superior gently explains they've caught the murderer: he's a schizophrenic, who suffered from sun-madness. Most people go mad by moonlight, the chief says, but this one couldn't stand the sun.
Hanlin is very pleased the mystery is solved. It was getting far too complicated.
After a stay in hospital, he says, hopefully he can enjoy his retirement.
Oh yes, say his superiors as they leave, closing the cell door behind them. Hanlin has certainly earned his retirement.
Around 1971, famed horror actor Christopher Lee was growing tired of being in Hammer Horror films. The company appeared to be on its last legs, and with risible dreck like Scars of Dracula and lesbian-vampire-gore-fest Lust for a Vampire comprising its last few years' productions, it was perhaps unsurprising the gravel-voiced thespian sought something with a little more (ahem) bite.
By chance Lee was introduced to screenwriter Anthony Shaffer, a rising star, though something of an unknown quantity. He'd just written Hitchcock’s Frenzy – a rather anemic, if critically popular, serial-killer flick with comic undertones.
The two apparently hit it off. Shaffer had just read Ritual, and raised the idea of Lee and director Robin Hardy doing it as a project. Shaffer and Hardy began work on rewriting it for the screen. Allegations they ripped off Pinner’s novel without crediting him seem to be untrue; the author reports being paid a tidy £15,000 for the privilege (something akin to $250,000 in 2020).
Later in his career Shaffer would become known for his detective pieces (alongside penning Hitchcock thrillers he’d also script Agatha Christie movies – thereby bringing the Pinner-in-Mousetrap-Shaffer-writes-Mousetrap-theatre-to-cinema loop full-circle). Though Ritual is definitely a darkly Gothic satire masquerading as a detective story, Shaffer and Hardy did not use a lot of that in their Wicker Man adaptation.
And while Ritual is, by turns, a comedy, the movie adaptation is not particularly funny. The few laughs that do slip out are predominantly found in bawdy songs, Christopher Lee's dapper heresy, and the tips and winks to its protagonist’s religious arrogance. But even then it’s hard to keep laughing at Howie’s earnest, if misplaced, scruples as the sun sets on the final reel.
According to the screenwriters, Lee showed a particular interest in the Pagan aspects of the story (he was, said one, one of the few people who knew what a wicker man actually was before even reading the script) and he was vocal in keeping the Christian/Pagan rivalry in the story. Lee himself, mind you, was no stranger to the dark arts. Despite playing myriad monsters on screen, he was also quite open about warning people not to mess about with magic and Satanism in real life, lest one calls something up.
By the end of the rewrites only a few core elements found their way from book to movie, more as conceits than specifics (Shafer, perhaps diplomatically, would say he couldn't work out how to give it a direct adaptation – anyone who's read the novel would surely agree).
Instead of the film's disappearance of a young girl on a rugged and starkly working-class Scottish island, in Ritual our "hero" Detective Sergeant David Hanlin instead visits a middle-class, "olde-worlde English" Cornish village on an investigation into the apparent ritual murder of a child.
Hanlin is not the puritanical and uniformed Sergeant Howie of the movie, but a sunglasses-wearing, sneering city-boy with an "Oliver Cromwell" complex and a fine line in fisticuffs against men, women and children. His religiosity is worn on his sleeve but only skin deep. It's the hypocrisy of a man who secretly enjoys his sins but is embarrassed by them, prefering they occur at night, far from prying eyes.
Stylistically, Ritual is the work of a young man. It’s unconventionally written, with a few neat witticisms and garlands of purple-prose. There's a lot of that kind of turgidly awkward turns of phrase you'd find in college creative-writing classes. Dialogue is often stilted – though I think deliberately so, despite some critics' claims at it being inept – and laced with the kind of rapid-fire patter you'd expect from a theater actor.
In fact, Pinner’s story is very much a "comedy" of the theater, all grand, sweeping emotions and grotesqueries, filled with caricatures and slapstick and puns. The flashes of clever wordplay are what you'd expect from early Pratchett or Douglas Adams.
As for the story...
PLOT SYNOPSIS
Just before May Day, outside the village of Thorn in Cornwall, young Dian Spark dies next to an oak tree, a sprig of garlic in her hand. Her best friend, Gilly, claims she died from falling off a branch while climbing - but she tells no one about the sound of flute notes ringing in her ears or the monkey head and bats she saw nailed to the oak tree's bark.
Enter Detective Inspector David Hanlin, a youngish Special Branch officer whose scarred eyes leave him sunblind without sunglasses. According to him he's busted a string of witch-cults and Satanic sects across the UK, and he thinks the Thorn cases will prove a pushover. There are hints he may have been to the town before, perhaps even have known Dian Spark - but his real reasons for being involved in such cases boils down to the murder of the little girl who used to live next-door to him when he was a boy.
Masquerading as a tourist, Hanlin arrives in town by train and bumps into the village's practically feral children, who run wild under the leadership of bully Fat Billy. Fat Billy hated Dian - and hates outsiders too. Following a bout of sunblindness when he loses his sunglasses, Hanlin winds up in the cemetery, where he finds clues of an occult nature, including sprigs of garlic left on Dian’s grave.
Reverend White, the loquacious and irritating local man of God, insists the village is a Christian one – something Hanlin disagrees with upon finding the altar cross is missing, replaced by a monkey's head and garlic flowers. The rector is horrified by the find but directs Hanlin to the tree where Dian died, under the misapprehension the policeman is actually the girl's uncle.
Across town Dian's mother - the resident village witch - has turned the weekly Bible study club held in her attic into a séance. She hopes to talk with her dead daughter. Midway through the ritual she accuses the other townsfolk present of being involved in the death, sparking a run of accusation and counter-accusation. Everyone there knows Mrs. Spark is the only one present with real knowledge of the esoteric, or so they claim.
Dian's university-age sister, a sexually rapacious and attractive young woman named Anna, listens to the arguments through the keyhole, then decides now is a good time to take the village children on an unspecified but evidently Druidic yomp into the forest.
Meanwhile, Hanlin has been making his through those self-same woods to visit the murder tree. Instead of an enjoyable return to nature, however, he's attacked by the local wild-man – a hyper-sexual and stereotypically surly gypsy who goes by the name of Gypo (subtlety is not this book's strong suit). One brief fight later and Hanlin is frog-marching Gypo, forcing the subdued thug into leading him to the oak tree where Dian was found.
At the tree the monkey's head has returned, pinned to the bark alongside two bat wing. Gypo laughingly claims he stuck them there for fun.
At this point Anna arrives with the children, claiming her trip to the tree is part of a "butterfly funeral" for Dian. She is impressed and sexually aroused by the detective, who is impressed in turn when she kicks Gypo, her ex-lover, in the balls for making unwanted advances toward her. Leaving Gypo prostrate, she seductively invites Hanlin to come home with her. There are no hotels in town, she explains, but he could share her bed.
Back at the seance, which has failed, the conveners argue again. Mrs. Spark angrily threatens to call out-of-town police in to investigate the death. The townsfolk are appalled that she might threaten the upcoming May Day festival by having outsiders in to tramp around. Realizing she may have gone too far, Mrs. Spark says her threat wasn't real and she'd never think of bringing in outsiders.
Unfortunately for her, it's right at this point Hanlin arrives with Anna, the latter explaining to the group that he's a detective. She then offers him lodgings in her dead sister’s room (!). The townsfolk, thinking Spark has brought in the policeman, end the session, snidely insult Hanlin and head home.
Anna's seduction of Hanlin fails and that night she is forced to rebutt Gypo (who comically tries to climb through her window for a bit of rumpy-pumpy). Very much turned on, Anna again tries to seduce Hanlin via the infamous, "through-the-wall strip-tease" that made 1973's movie adaptation such pleasant viewing. Hanlin uses all his strength to withstand Anna's sexual advances, so the young woman instead decides to sneak out and take the village children on a late night reverie, back to the old oak tree.
Here the kids press themselves against its bark in a hallucinatory nature-rite, witnessing images of butterflies. It is hinted that butterflies, tied to rebirth, may in fact be the reincarnated Dian.
Fat Billy, having hated Dian, has a jolly time squashing any butterflies he sees - something the other children chastise him violently for at various points in the novel. In fact, Billy's control over the group seems to be only by consent rather than his own power. He seems honestly scared of them sometimes.
The following day, Hanlin wakes and tries to interrogate the village’s varied stereotypes. First is the Squire, whose claims to musical incompetence fall on deaf ears, for his fluting is disturbingly good and unsettlingly Lovecraftian. Like the rector, the riddlesome Squire talks in circles, but recommends the detective speak with Lawrence Cready, camp ex-actor and dabbler in the occult.
Wealthy Cready has turned the local mansion into a museum of demonology, though it transpires all his grimoires and altars are fake. Nevertheless, he has a disturbing interest in the local children – as well as photographs of a “dead” Dian taken months earlier. It was part of a “game” he plays with the kids, he tells Hanlin. The blood is jam.
On the mansion grounds the children visit creepy Cready for archery lessons, but Hanlin’s bully-boy browbeating of the kids over Dian's death pushes an angry Fat Billy into attacking him. From the boy’s pocket falls a doll with a large pin stuck through it. "Dian" is written across its back.
Hanlin gives Fat Billy a thrashing and accuses him of murdering the girl, but while Fat Billy admits to hating Dian and claims both her and her mother were witches who haunted the children’s dreams, he denies the crime and runs off. Hanlin gives chase only to lose his pudgy suspect in the woods. He suffers another bout of sunblindness.
With the whole town turned against Mrs Spark, the witch holds a public hypnosis session on Gilly, hoping to prove her belief that a murderer lurks among the townsfolk. But Gilly, even under hypnosis, stands firm that Dian died in an accidental fall.
It would seem there was no murder - at least until Fat Billy is found dead at the base of the same tree where Dian died. The needle from his voodoo doll has been driven through his ear and into his brain.
Arriving on the scene, Hanlin devises a convoluted ruse to try to uncover the killer. He claims Billy is still alive and merely injured (for only the murderer also knows he's truly dead). He anonymously tips off Anna, hoping her panic might prove her guilt or lead her to the real culprit. Instead, no one in town believes her claims Billy's not breathing. It's another dead-end, just like pretty much everything else in the book. Hanlin calls in a police surgeon to do an autopsy on Billy's body but the results, again, show no sign of occultism.
While resting in Dian's bedroom, thinking of Anna's shapely curves, Hanlin receives a letter from Cready, inviting him to a moon worshipping ceremony at the mansion. He claims he has clues to offer. Our heroic detective, despite his staunch belief it's a trick, does as requested. At the mansion he finds Cready and his manservant dressed as women in an apparent attempt to seduce him.
Much homoerotic banter occurs as the two transvestites enact a Pagan fire ritual. Hanlin starts to fear that his arousal is proof Cready has some mesmeric sexual power. Or perhaps the detective just doesn't want to admit he might be a bit gay.
Meanwhile, in town the villagers are dressed as animals and in Pagan dress. To the Squire's music they march down to the beach, where they light a bonfire and sacrifice a horse and a keg of beer to the ocean. A bisexual orgy follows. Up at the mansion Hanlin sees the burning braziers by the water and realizes he’s been tricked. Cready laughingly tells the detective neither he nor his manservant are gay and were only acting as a decoy. In anger, Hanlin rushes to the nightsurf, catching the village in flagrante coitus.
Only Gypo is not present. Hysterical accusations of the town's bestial nature fall on deaf ears as Hanlin realizes he’s been played. Far from the great detective he thinks he is, everyone has lied to him, mocked him, run rings around him. What they're doing isn't illegal, they point out. If anything it's perfectly natural.
Dejectedly, our defeated detective stalks back to his room, which he finds ransacked - and the needle that killed Billy planted among his belongings. A flirtatious Anna drops by to seduce him but he's not having it: the town, the lies, the fact she could be the murderer, reach boiling-point. In a white haze he beats the living snot out of her, breaking her nose.
Thrown out of the house, he approaches the local police (who, after confessing they knew of the town's Paganism and fear it, offer him a cell to sleep in). Hanlin snaps; he phones his superiors to send in a Special Branch team to round-up everyone, send in dogs, break out the thumbscrews. He's going to resign, anyway - this has been his last case.
He wakes the next morning, having broken into and slept in the church. The village children rush up and down the pews. Without Fat Billy they seem kinder, but one of them gleefully steals his sunglasses. In a blind panic, unable to see, he almost chokes one of the girls to get them back.
He apologizes and has a sudden leap-of-non-logic that Gilly - who is not present - must have stolen the cross earlier to give to the murder cult for their Satanic rituals. The children lead him to her, but in his haste he trips and falls. The kids vanish. He sits and awaits the arrival of the police raid, but in a momentary flash decides Gypo must be the killer - he is an outsider, oversexed, and apparently hates the villagers. In some ways, we shall soon realize, he is more correct than he knows.
Out of the trees comes the woodsman, armed with a bow. Hanlin threatens to arrest him, accuses him of murder, but Gypo laughs - his rustic accent gone, replaced with an educated brogue - and he tells Hanlin only two people saw Fat Billy die and know who the murderer is: Gypo and Hanlin himself. Gypo shoots the detective with an arrow, enough to wound but not kill, and they struggle, grappling, blood everywhere. Hanlin blacks out.
He wakes in the woods. Gypo is dead - pinned to a tree by an arrow - and as he looks at the corpse the police arrive, with dogs. Around the village, detectives round up villagers under accusations of sexual impropriety, prostitution, bestiality, anything that can drag them in for questioning.
Hanlin realizes that only an archer could have killed Gypo, and the only archers are up at Cready's mansion, where he saw the children practicing. He races up there but finds that, instead of just Cready, all the main villagers are there: Cready, the Squire, the Reverend and Anna, all engaged in archery.
Accusing them all of being murderers, telling them the police will be here soon with dogs, he grabs Anna and leads her away to the beach. She may not have killed the two children, he says, but he knows she killed Gypo. She killed him because he knew who the true killers are. Anna says that she would have killed him because he was attacking someone she loved.
On the beach they stop. She kisses him. From the sand-dune the feral children watch. Anna takes off Hanlin's glasses and they make love. When they are finished she lays there on the dune as Hanlin walks off to find a policemen.
Cut to a hospital. David is having his injuries bandaged, his superiors listening intently as he explains the case. But there's one thing he doesn't understand; he remembers kissing Anna, them sliding to the sand, and then him finding the policeman. But when he and the constable returned to the dune, someone had stabbed Anna dead with a paper-knife through her ear. A death much like Fat Billy's.
Who killed Anna, he asks?
Hanlin's superior gently explains they've caught the murderer: he's a schizophrenic, who suffered from sun-madness. Most people go mad by moonlight, the chief says, but this one couldn't stand the sun.
Hanlin is very pleased the mystery is solved. It was getting far too complicated.
After a stay in hospital, he says, hopefully he can enjoy his retirement.
Oh yes, say his superiors as they leave, closing the cell door behind them. Hanlin has certainly earned his retirement.
THOUGHTS AND FLIM-FLAM
Let's get the bad out of the way first. If reading that synopsis left you confused and breathless, you're not alone; this book is about fifteen times more confusing and breathless in reading.
Also: exceptionally flowery.
In fact, despite having read it two or three times (it's only 140-ish pages long), I'm still not sure if my synopsis is 100% accurate. Events are mostly chronological, yet people's emotions seem to be a chapter ahead or behind the events. Major characters (even murder suspects) appear in one scene, wax lyrical, then vanish for dozens of pages. Bit-part walk-ons teeter through the background in cycles, clogging up the text and making us lose track of what's going-on.
Ironically, it's these underused side-characters that are among the best in the novel.
Take Jeremiah the gravedigger, who only gets a voice in the second chapter, then becomes a mannequin. He's a man who, bored with funerals and saddened no one engages in grave-robbery anymore, broods on the thought of going berserk with his spade, to "split open a few greasy heads, rape the odd lady, and conduct a mass burial with the priest on the top. But only for a second, though. He wanted his dinner even more. And he was not a violent man."
Or the three bucolic farmhands who show up with a knowing wink and nod, giving sly hints that more is afoot than the town lets on. Yet despite their seeming early importance (in a MacBeth "three-witches" kind of way), they do and say nothing else. Showing up to engage in a daisy-chain menage a trois at the beach orgy, they exit the story entirely.
Or the toothless police surgeon who, called in by Hanlin, is found sleeping in the detective's bed and nearly gets beaten to a pulp up for it. One of the funnier characters in the book, he gives a summary of the situation (mostly that it's a fool's errand and the clues point to none of the suspects) before also promptly vanishing. Hanlin's superior (a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed Chief Inspector) is talked to on the phone from time-to-time. He's a peach; worth the price of the book alone.
But these ages of dialogue are given over to fun side characters with absolutely no clues provided or return for their investment.
I could go on but I'll leave it aside to talk about the plot. On first reading it seems an enormous Scooby-Doo faux-mystery, complete with shaggy-dog ending. Hanlin might be a detective but there's no logic or reason to his work; he meanders from scene-to-scene, is insulted by the people he interviews, then goes home. There are no clues in the classical sense because there is no conundrum; Dian apparently did die from falling out of a tree.
Midway through the story a real murder appears in the cadaver of Fat Billy. This mystery has real clues! But by then the story's gone off the rails, much like Hanlin, who flails wildly until calling in the cavalry to kick down doors and harass the gentlefolk of Thorn.
If ever a story followed the tropes of a bad RPG this is probably it. Everything Hanlin does is a string of failed dice rolls, wallpapered over by serendepitous nose-leading. If people didn't send Hanlin letters asking him to come meet him, he probably wouldn't leave the house.
But it all leads to the best bit (or the worst bit, depending on your predilections): the twist at the end.
Sure, it's a "short-story twist", out of the left-field. Some say it's not a proper "twist" at all, though I disagree with reviewers' claims that it ruins the book. If anything it made me flick back through the previous chapters and notice how all the "occult clues" Hanlin found in the first half of the story only appeared after one of his "sun" turns.
Was he the one who placed the garlic on Dian's grave? Did he actually kill the girl who lived next door to him when he was a young man, thereby driving him to become a police detective? Did many of the events even take place?
But then it's down the rabbit hole.
The "clues," if they are clues, often point in multiple directions at once. For instance, did Anna or someone else kill Gypo? (My between-the-lines hunch is that Hanlin killed Gypo, since the arrow he rips from his arm disappears - yet an arrow now pins the dead man to the tree. That's if Gypo wasn't a "mirror-inversion" of Hanlin's imagination all along... for while Hanlin is the over-sexed outsider who turns down a woman's touch, Gypo is the over-sexed outsider who can't get a break). Did Dian really fall from that tree - there are hints Gilly is lying right from the beginning, when she hides the occult paraphernalia at the scene from investigators. Maybe the kids were the cult all along...
And the biggest question of them all: considering Hanlin's remarkable knowledge of the case and early claims at "knowing" Dian, did he in fact kill her?
You kind of want to keep prodding and poking on the assumption there must be an answer. But with the prose so convoluted and the plotting so mired in its own cleverness, you realize there's absolutely no point.
By the end of the book you can't help but feel Pinner wanting to get hs book over and done with, chapters racing by, events compressed to only a few lines. I won't feel bad for feeling the same reading it.
So is Ritual worth reading?
Maybe.
For Wicker Man completists and those with a penchant for 1960s pop-fiction, this book will probably get a rise of emotion (not necessarily good ones, if you're a Wicker Fan). I've read it two or three times back-to-back, so I'm hardly going to say it was a waste of time, but it's definitely not a must-read or something you'll come away from feeling like you've expanded your literary horizons.
But if you want to read something decidedly different, something that's surreal and (in parts) beautiful, it's probably worth picking up. For a good couple of days after I read it my mind kept wandering back to it, trying to fit pieces in order, trying to rearrange a puzzle that I've come to the conclusion is deliberately unsolveable.
I think that was Pinner's point all along.
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