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In the next chapter the narrator, Hanny's brother who witnessed all of this, makes it understood that it was Hanny who actually shot the kid. Though Manchester does have the Town Hall as a great gothic centrepiece and is, like other northern cities, haunted in a sense by the industrial buildings of the past. I was stuck on wondering, crossly, why the narrator didn't tell Father Bernard about the lamb being killed by Collier's dog - it would have been the truest thing to do.However, the boys' mother Esther (who the narrator refers to as Mummer) is determined to cure Hanny's muteness by appealing to God and puts him through a series of ardent prayers and rituals to cure him.

Opportunist cocklepickers, ignorant of what they were dealing with, drove their trucks onto the sands at low tide and washed up weeks later with green faces and skin like lint. He is as happy with births, marriages and deaths as he is with hammed-up folk ritual and dialogue that splits the difference between Stella Gibbons and Susan Cooper. And so unless one suffered, Father Wilfred was wont to remind us, one could not be a true Christian.His characters are thoroughly well drawn - and that's no easy accomplishment in a multi-character novel like this. This putting out of a hand to tug the reader into the text is at the crux of the gothic, and is as rare as it is delicious.