Early in the haunting and beautifully-written novel, The Sin Eater by Alice Thomas Ellis, we are brought into the legend of the Welsh princess who retreated from the valley castle of her degenerate father and his courtiers and went to the highest mountaintop to watch, proud and unmoved, as the sea flooded over the castle, drowning everyone. Present-day visitors to the coastal town swim unaware over the bones and broken stones laying under fathoms of sea.  The princess is now a saint in certain eyes, revered for her righteousness and ascetics.  She was not a “sin eater”, a person willing to take away the sins of a dead person by eating and drinking literally off the coffin of the dead.  The sin eater is an old Welsh tradition and the eating usually fell to the unwanted, the unloved, the poor, to perform, an act for which they were paid in some way.  The princess saint was more of a relisher of sin, or rather, she relished in the harsh judgment visited on sinners.

The characters of this marvelous novel are the members, servants, and hangers-on of a well-to-do, old Welsh family, who have gathered together one summer weekend as the patriarch is dying. Religion, social class, and present-day mores are also almost like characters, throwing their long shadows over the family and dictating their actions.  Only Rose, the daughter-in-law of the old man and keeper of the house, seems above the din and fray; she is able to see things as they really are and her judgment is harsh.  She perfects her cooking, the housekeeping, her garden –”there was nothing she liked better than to have the ordering of things great and small, animate and inanimate — but we quickly come to realize that she is Martha Stewart as the sword of God: her good food, fine housekeeping and decorating, and even her gardening, are all perfectly planned to bring out the worse in everyone and to render their judgment as sinners certain.

Despite — or because of — this acuity of appraisal and cleverness of manipulation, I liked Rose, and the youngest daughter, Ermyn, neglected after the death of her mother long ago, is also enthralled.  She trusts Rose because of the love she shows her own children (sent away now to spare them the atmosphere of death) and because Rose has made the house over into a much better place than it used to be. And yet she is scared of her as well:  “[s]he thought Rose brave, but wondered whether she was good; she was pure, but so were some poisons in that unadulterated sense.“  As the sins begin to add up, not only of the dying man, but of all members of the family, we see that Rose is the princess saint passing judgment over all the decay and mediocrity she sees around her.  But who then is Ermyn?

Is Ermyn the sin eater?  She is the odd-man out, the unloved one, pitied and even worse, laughed at by a servant: “Her sense of identity with the human race, never very strong, suffered a further lesion.  Better be one of the sheep cropping beyond the fence at the unprotesting turf, better be one of the sullen rocks holding back the mountain, better even be the bluebottle musing over a sheep turd under the hydrangea – better be anything than part of that multiple monster.” Ermyn perceives the evil around her; she feels it before she sees it but then her sight is good and even more far-reaching than that of Rose.  She assigns each player in the weekend drama to the sin they represent: pride, gluttony, covetousness, lust, anger, sloth.  But will Ermyn also take up the sins, sparing the judgment? Or in the end, will she be the princess saint, witness to the drowning of sinners and innocents alike?  The book leaves you gasping and in despair; I hold on to just slightest flicker of hope that the innocent will survive.

This is a magnificently wrought book, every detail perfect, every description rich and mesmerizing, and almost bewitching in the most evil of manners.  I felt the pull of old traditions and the tinny promise of modernity, smelled the possibility of redemption but then underneath everything, the seething stink of corruption and desperation.  The sins will not be eaten, they will be visited on future generations.  So stop your sinning, now, hang onto whatever hope you have, and connect firmly to others.  Cheery book for a winter’s day.  But a beautiful book: read it.