`Prayer’ plot lets reader down

THE PRAYER OF THE BONE, by Paul Bryers, Bloomsbury Publishing, New York City, 1998, 279 pages, paperback, $23.95.

The atmosphere is grand, but it’s not enough to make a great novel.

“The Prayer of the Bone,” by Paul Bryers, has plenty of Down East Maine atmosphere — rocky cliffs, American Indian burial grounds, fog of varying thicknesses.

Happily, the novel also plants unique characters in the fictional town of Bridport. Calhoun, the police detective with the mysterious past, and Jessica, the witchcraft-savvy sister of the murder victim, both remain consistent and interesting to the end.

And the murder. Ah, yes. That’s where we’re set up for disappointment. The novel starts out with a promising plot, develops it on several interesting levels — and then lets us down in the end. That’s not to say the book is bad.

Here’s the basic idea:

Maddie Ross is found dead on the site of an archaeological dig, apparently killed by a bear during the first snow of autumn. She’s a waitress who also works part time on the dig, a beautiful single mother, a wildly independent environmentalist and an English woman who came to Maine to seek her American Indian roots.

She is, in other words, a complex character who intrigues the reader even though she’s dead.

Her sister arrives from Oxford, England, and turns out to be equally complex. Jessica Ross is an academic with a professional interest in witchcraft and who is horrified by cold, which she imagines as “her personal demon, her succubus, her penance for forbidden thoughts, her flagellator — the ghost of a defrocked priest who watched her with malignant eyes from the frozen walls and wrapped himself around her at nights or when her spirits were low, breathing his graveyard breath on her neck, insinuating his bony fingers up her skirts, inside her sweaters, feeling through flannelette nighties and knickers penetrating to the bone.”

Gracious. And I thought I hated winter.

All her life, Jessica has been the “good” sister, but she is nonetheless unsure how she feels about mothering Maddie’s disturbed 9-year-old daughter, Freya.

Freya is a central character in the novel, yet is never understood by the reader. This is partly because she isn’t understood by those characters around her. She runs into the woods, makes animal noises, and apparently communes with the dead.

The story takes place in the days when Maddie’s autopsy is under way in Augusta and Detective Calhoun is investigating the murder. Locals doubt a black bear would have attacked the young woman. Jessica visits the local American Indian reservation, and starts to wonder about shape shifting and shaman rituals that might make a human being act as a wild animal.

Bryers, a former history teacher who lives in London, does a masterful job with the supernatural part of his story. The spirit world expresses itself in the coastal landscape, and the writer’s trees, winds and snow have subtle, expressive qualities. On nature’s flip side is a human world described with repellent allure. The coastal bar has “a fug of smoke dense as the fog outside. Sweating, bearded faces, red mouths wet with drink.”

Bryers weaves history through his present-day murder mystery, a technique that grounds the story and makes it more believable. We learn about the earliest English settlers in conflict with American Indians on the Down East coast, although we’re never sure how much of this history is factual.

“The Prayer of the Bone” is at heart a whodunit, and while we’re fed clues along the way, we never really have a chance to solve it. The outcome emerges out of the blue, and was never really suggested. We’ve all faced this kind of ending before, in books or movies, and it’s hard not to feel cheated.

Fog is fine for atmosphere, but it lacks the substance to fill in the gaps in this story.