THE VILLAGE WIT follows Richard and Peggy's often humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love's fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect.
Noted author Mark Beyer, along with Siren & Muse Publishing, bring you a story that walks in the shadows of love's corners.
American Richard Bentley settles in rural England, looking for the contented life of a bookshop keeper and some fun with the local women. His wife of fourteen years left him out of "marital boredom," so Heath-on-the-Wold seems the ideal place to get lost in work and forget the past. Bentley then hires Peggy White, a mid-forties townswoman who seems his match in sass and intellect. Soon, the rules of attraction open a new chapter in their lives.
Excerpt
Richard Bentley knelt inside his bookshop’s window case. Wizened hands adjusted a book here, a creased drape cloth there. He wore his favorite jeans, faded and soft and frayed along the bottoms, a split across each knee. The first sunshine in days lay on the sill like a newly dropped doily, cleaned, starched, and showing the lemony tints of age. Bentley’s hand moved through the sunlight, holding a book. His brown loafers were hooked over the platform edge in the attitude of a Sunday snoozer. His tie swung as he moved, not unlike Poe’s pendulum, he thought, but in this story only helping to dust the book heads. He stopped long enough to look through the window, his way of separating the day into many fragments between work, thought, rest, and a hot meal taken near ten at night.
Bentley breathed. Isn’t it enough to call out to the world I don’t know anything! and be happy with what you have? If said loud enough—in a caustic, soylent voice—you can find enough foresight to help plan the clothes-washing cycle and market shopping. Isn’t that enough? No, no. I’m not cut out to be a bum, he thought. Sometimes none of us knows what the hell we are doing, but I know where to buy used books and how talk to people dithering between titles held in their grabby, scales-of-justice hands, then send them out the door with both books in a bag, their cash in my pocket. That’s useful business and, okay, so take it all and five dollars, too, and you can buy a cup of coffee and … a used book. Not a bad way to spend time. He exhaled.
Outside, Heath-on-the-Wold had awakened late to this year’s spring, and nearing noontime now the sunshine had dried storefronts along High Street, their water stains fading into the brick façades and stone foundations, the eaves less weighted in their sag, windows smiling in blue tint, doors agape with laughter, all having felt the force of sheet rain for a full week running under green-blue clouds, like the scene on a William Turner canvas. Bentley was half-surprised not to see roots growing up from the ground, their white fingers reaching for the sun’s golden life force, shining and blinding. Across the road, a middle-aged mother in blue curlers and red tartan skirt towed her recalcitrant girl child away from a gift shop window. A pointed finger and chilling wail broke the calm warmth the sunlight had promised would stay for a few hours.
At least he liked his bookshop, Bentley thought. “There is that,” he said aloud—Bentley was saying a lot of things aloud lately that were meant for himself but where others could hear—he finished with “Every action has its consequence.” Shakespeare said: To business that we love we rise betime / And go to’t with delight. The shop has hardwood flooring that creaks to let you know it’s alive.
He picked up a 1962 edition of Borges’ Labyrinths, ran his thumb down its smooth brown spine, then placed the book upright on the black muslin fabric. His cottage, too, Bentley thought, he liked his two-bedroom cottage on Sycamore Lane with its garden he did not design and seldom saw in daylight anymore. He used them rarely nowadays—cottage and garden—because he found himself always working at the bookshop. Bentley even had doubts about his knowledge of Heath-on-the-Wold, a golden town by virtue of the particular shade of sandstone quarried from beneath the Cotswolds topsoil, stacked like sugar cubes and covered by slate tiles. Heath’s buildings glowed in morning and evening sun like the candlelight on a miner’s tin helmet. He knew Heath just as much as he needed to know to run a successful business, and so he ran with the idea that people were the same all over because he’d learned this was true, more or less, despite the human impulse towards pettiness and … Wasn’t the one description enough? Yes. So it was good that he liked his little bookshop, he thought again, a place for him to sort his books, shelve them, pack shipments, talk with customers about books and about stories and about reading—and talk of his “house music” came up, too—a place to avoid discussing “the society of watchers” England and America had become in the era where televisions are found in every room of the house. Bentley read some of his books, too. Who owns a bookshop and doesn’t open a few covers every hour or so, just to absorb that other place through the colored glass? He also liked the bookshop’s name, The Village Wit, a title that described all manner of rural life. If the name was pretentious it was so in a literary way, a forgivable gesture at marketing. He had thought about all these things a lot lately, which was also good for Bentley.
Only, the bookshop had taken over his life, of a sort. He had moved from the States not long ago to buy the storefront—eschewing a try in London for obvious reasons—to renovate the space, make it into a used bookshop exactly for a singular purpose: to have a business that could consume the hours, now that Nan was gone. Well, left. So he got what he had wanted, and was happy, mostly. His plan was working. But then what does happy really mean? The word was loaded with innuendo, riddled with assumptions. Both depended on who was being asked, and who was questioning. Bentley had thought about this a lot lately, too, which was less good for him.
Nan had told him she was happy, and that she loved him. She said so using soft voices, screeches, and coos nearly every day of their marriage, right up to the day she told him she wasn’t, and didn’t. Bentley thought that was a case of assumption. Just when they had hit their stride, gotten life working with them, not fighting the current, she decided that marriage was not what she wanted. Odd as her decision was to him that black day, and the gray days following, he felt she’d never meant any harm by leaving him. Before marriage, they had agreed that if either was no longer happy, the other would not prevent happiness being found elsewhere. Best-laid plans reads the cliché. Beside the point, really, because now another memory of another time came to mind. Its colors were deep river and autumn aspen leaves. He didn’t want to remember that event, so he closed his mind to the image pushing against the membrane he hoped had not grown thin.
Bentley fiddled with four of his newest books, rare volumes of English and Irish and Scottish tales. They stood paddle wheel style on a shelf he’d made with an empty wooden box draped in ivory muslin. Black and ivory columns, chessboard colors to seize attention. Five boxes surrounded him in the window case, each a different height, pedestals stacked with books for a casual glance or discriminate study: old fiction titles, not-quite-new fiction, children’s lit, Cotswolds history and countryside cookbooks, a few books on London, a few on Continental travel and American travel. The art of knowing the clientele’s tastes is the art of being a good merchant. While he adjusted the books he saw shadows pass across his hands, short fat shadows of people walking past the shop. He didn’t look up.
There was a time in his life, he recalled, girlfriend-less days at fifteen and sixteen years old, when he wanted nothing more than to lavish one woman with love, respect, care, and understanding. That had happened for him one-and-a-half times in his life. Hmm. And so … he was alone now—forty-seven and just about ready to send a postcard to the ex with a bon mot Thanks for my life back, lady. He loved his bookshop in little Heath-on-the-Wold, away from everything. This little round of England.
Professional Reviews
Like Reading A Classic
Mark Beyer's use of descriptive language to create his scenes took me back to the days when I gorged myself on classic literature. By the end of the first chapter, you'll feel you're standing inside the bookstore in rural England. The Village Wit is the kind of book you read when you're not in a hurry, or need to slow down from the hurry of your day. If printed, it would weigh in at a whopping 522 pages. Admittedly, I did find myself using my Kindle's integrated dictionary on occasion, to look up words I wasn't quite sure about. The writer in me took a few mental notes along the way, especially in the way Beyer crafted his auxiliary cast. Mr. Whipple, foremost among those who stick out in my mind as a character who, though the story could have been told without him, made the experience so much more enjoyable.
— Carl Purdon, author
The Village Wit — a review
It has been a week since I finished reading Mark Beyer’s ‘The Village Wit’ and the story is still lurking in the back of my mind, stirring memories and making me think.
Did I enjoy it? Yes and no. Am I glad I read it? Absolutely. ‘The Village Wit’ is a beautiful story that takes a long, hard look at love. Not the wish-fulfillment fantasy love of a romance novel but the warts and all love that can grow between real people with real lives and real baggage. This book is about love ‘as it is’ rather than as we would like it to be.
The protagonists – Richard and Peggy – are forty-somethings who have both had long term relationships. Richard’s marriage ended in divorce. Peggy’s left her a widow. Neither one is in a hurry to replace the loves they have lost, yet a bookshop brings them together and a spark is ignited. This spark leads to a growing attraction that culminates in some beautifully written but fairly explicit sex scenes. I was a little surprised but not at all offended because every word seemed appropriate and ‘right’. It would be wrong however to think that the consummation of sex was the climax [forgive the pun] of the story. The true climax is purely emotional and traces the demands and expectations we place on those we have come to love.
To be honest the climax and ending sent me back into my own past and made me question whether my perspective back then could have been a little skewed, a little wrong. That kind of introspection is rarely all fun and games, hence my ambivalence about whether I enjoyed the novel or not. In the final analysis, I think I did.
One thing I am certain about however is that Mark Beyer is a very good writer. He presents the story of this relationship from the point of view [pov] of both protagonists without bias. More importantly he does what few male writers are capable of doing – he gets inside Peggy’s skin and makes her real. The book would be worth reading for that if nothing else. As a fledgling writer myself I know how impossibly hard it is to create a believable character of the opposite sex. So hats off to Beyer for pulling off some rather extraordinary characterizations.
And now to a few small things that could have been perfect but were not. As a work of literature Beyer peppered his prose with a great many descriptive passages. Some worked, turning his words into vivid, lyrical prose worthy of a great master but all too often the frequent descriptions and metaphors just fell flat, jerking me out of the story rather than drawing me deeper inside. I honestly feel that in this case, less truly would have been more.
For me, the most beautiful parts of the prose were often the simplest. In these passages, Beyer’s connection to his characters shone through without artifice – pure, clean, honest. This man has a voice that will be heard more and more in the future.
Highly recommended.
— Meeka's Mind
Good Meta-Literature
"The Village Wit" is not so much literature as it is meta-literature -- literature about literature -- and that's all right, since it's about a rare books dealer in the Cotswalds reegion of southwest England. Only he's an American. Richard Bentley is fed up with love after an unsuccessful 14-year marriage. He thrives on one-night stands, minus the emotional investment that a longer relationship would require. So he is chary of going to far with his new employee, Peggy White, who is more than his match in sass and intellect. "The Village Wit," the name of Bentley's bookshop, is highly embroidered and a bit over-written and under-edited, but for those who like to poke into the shadows of love, this book is for them. And, for a guy, he writes some damned good sex scenes.
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