The Earth Weighs Heavily by Alison Joseph

 

credit - Adrian Pope

If you ask a writer ‘when did you decide to become a writer’ you will almost certainly get some kind of mumbled answer about ‘it not really being a decision’- ‘it kind of happened’- ‘I was the sort of kid who sat in a corner in the classroom watching people…’

Or perhaps that’s just me.

But it did just kind of happen. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t tell stories. And then gradually it morphed from a thing I just did, to a thing I might do for a living. There followed short stories, and radio plays. And then came Sister Agnes.

At the time I was doing a lot of adaptation for BBC Radio Drama, and a lot of it was crime fiction. I began to think about writing a detective. I knew I wanted her to be female. And I knew I wouldn’t be able to do justice to a police procedural. But, I wondered, how to write an amateur detective in this age of police expertise, where she has no access to all the tools of police investigations – all the forensic know-how, CCTV footage, mobile phone records. I had also worked out that my detective needed to be in some way set apart from ordinary life, and also not burdened by family, partners, offspring…

A nun, I thought. That solves all those problems.

And so Sister Agnes came into being.

At the time I didn’t know much about nuns. My school was the local comprehensive, and we weren’t a religious family. 

Over the years, I’ve come to learn a lot about religious orders, both closed, and open like Agnes’s. But what I hadn’t predicted was that a literary device for a contemporary amateur detective would become so much more. For Sister Agnes there is the eternal question – how to continue in a faith that preaches forgiveness and redemption when all around her, in urban London, in the world, there is suffering and violence and harm.

The new novel is called The Earth Weighs Heavy. It is about death, of course. Mysterious, or criminal, or in one case just of old age. It is about refugees and exile and how people, uprooted from their home because it’s no longer safe, fight so hard to get somewhere else, to load the cart and start again; and continue to have hope, because once that’s gone you might as well be dead.

The story starts with bones revealed in the convent cellar. Agnes has been working at the charity’s base at the Calais refugee camps, but she’s been ordered to return – and now finds herself at the heart of a possible crime scene.

Meanwhile, her friend Athena has a brush with magic, which raises the question, when does a belief in magic crunch up against religious faith - or is it all the same? As Athena says, quoting her new young magician friend, people who have a sense of wonder are special people. But it’s Agnes, who, in spite of her religious faith, is determinedly rational, and who sticks with the evidence – and so finds herself investigating the story of the bones in the cellar.

It is also, I realise now, a love letter to London. It’s my hometown, born and bred, but like all Londoners, at some point we came here and stayed. The Romans created London as a huge, crowded, chaotic trading city, and even now I sometimes sense the Roman streets beneath. Throughout the centuries, people have ended up as Londoners: sometimes coerced, sometimes welcomed; sometimes, just loading the cart and starting again.

The Earth Weighs Heavy by Alison Joseph ( Joffe Books) Out Now.

Meet Sister Agnes. She's not your typical nun. She loves killer heels, sipping prosecco - and solving baffling mysteries . . . Now an acclaimed BBC Radio Crime series, starring Anne-Marie Duff. Hackney convent - home to Agnes and her sisters - may be a house of God. But what's buried beneath is anything but saintly. After days of brutal storms and lashing rain, the convent's crumbling cellar gives up a terrible secret. The skeleton of a woman. Her identity is a puzzle the police can't solve. Not without a helping hand from sleuthing Sister Agnes. But her search for answers, deep in the convent's chequered past, only leads to more questions. Late one night, Agnes is woken by a gunshot - and the fear that history is about to repeat itself. Someone under this roof knows more than they're saying. And they'll stop at nothing to keep their secrets.