“Here comes the Shepherdess.” So says Fee Kemp-Davies to herself, of herself. And here comes The Shepherdess, the final part of Iain Brimswall’s Zoo Keeper trilogy. The writer’s strategy is to record his development in a meaningful way, weaving stories from sociological themes in an enthusiastic embrace of the socio-novel. His trilogy offers more than three aspects of a central idea, it traces a quelling path from indignant polemic to practical acceptance of what goes on out there. This third instalment may be considered the reaching of a career milestone.

Miss Cade is a teaching aid at a bush missionary in East Africa when she falls severely ill to the sleeping sickness. Moved to a coastal town and supplied with the ‘resurrection’ drug (eflornithine), she survives the close call. It is clear to the convalescent young woman that the Lord has saved her for a purpose.

On her enforced return to England and – at least officially – reverting to Kemp-Davies, homeless and almost penniless Fiona deposits herself at the Church of the Message of God run from the elaborate rural retreat of self-styled faith-principal Dominic Hope. Fee, a faith-graduate of the church, is reluctantly lent a room. When her search for a job in community development meets with no success, Dominic asks Fee what she would really like to do. Her answer, to spread the Word of the Lord among the deprived estates of the nearby city, sparks a change of attitude in the leader and a proposal to back her mission.

Fee’s faith awareness events are well received in the community though attendance by the yobbish Lance and his lieutenants would confirm to the reader that there is a greater agenda being pursued by Dominic behind his fringe church front, one in which Fee has an increasingly important role – the distribution of illegal drugs.

As if her involvement with the church’s darker dealings is not enough in terms of risk, Fee plans an affair with the (married) writer Craig Mains. The character was introduced in Missed Chapters; here he is encountered at the point of entering the best sellers list with a new book railing against religion. Fee’s unlikely aim is to try to convert him. The dichotomous relationship is brought to an end when the wife finds the two in flagrante delicto.

A full-scale dawn raid by the police on the Church of the Message of God puts Fee on the run. Her escape, she muses soon afterwards, was a little too easy. With Dominic’s illicit operation shut down, there is a vacuum in a potentially violent trade. Fee is quick to grasp that she is being used as bait.

It’s a rainy Friday evening when a taxi enters a neat commuter village and delivers a distressed Fee to the doorstep of Su Gardeen. The address was once Fee’s too, when she and Su were lovers. Su (whose story filled Missed Chapters) and Ellis (protagonist of The Zoo Keeper) live together ostensibly as partners. They hide Fee when the police come calling the following week supposedly to check on the wanted girl’s background, but otherwise the couple don’t know what to do about their uninvited guest.

Never fully recovered from the illness in Africa, and prone to relapses both physically and mentally, Fee provides a solution of sorts by dying in her bed, her demise the consequence of prolonged drug consumption. Su, after immediate panic, police attention, the funeral, and a short period of mourning, has a lot to ponder. The regional community development agency which she uninhibitedly heads is conducting a government-funded drugs discouragement pilot. Wouldn’t the situation make the perfect cover for someone taking over the estate drugs networks? Isn’t it a truth that, in a time of economic uncertainty, the only dependable investment is the market in street drugs? High-spending Su, well-informed Su, superwoman Su. In Su’s contemplation, the Shepherdess is dead, long live the Shepherdess.

Three main themes are exercised in the novel. The prime one is religion: as assaulted by the commercial atheism of Craig Mains; as cynically exploited by Dominic Hope via his peculiar church; as practised according to the personal evangelism of Fee Cade. Religion is shown to be different things to different people, a commodity or a resource as well as a conviction. When opposing stances are brought into contact, the effect produces some stimulating reading. The directions tracked in the book represent abuses of religion, save perhaps for the Church of the Message of God which, despite its calamitous press, endeavours on under new management, spiritually pure and seemingly sincere.

The activity is implicit or lightly described. It isn’t a case of drugs bad, no drugs good. Quite the reverse for Africa: production of the supremely effective resurrection drug was at one time halted because the disease it treats was considered to affect only people who are unable to afford it. Elsewhere, there is the argument for the relief of chronic pain by illicit means when the NHS fails, plus the cynical suggestion that drugs as a means of inducing a false contentment are cheaper for society than is the removal of the conditions on our deprived estates which cause the misery and hopelessness, and from which people – especially the young – desperately seek to escape. In other words, what’s good and bad in drugs tends to be an arbitrary judgement swung heavily against the poor.

The trilogy ultimately returns to the point of view of Ellis Carmichael. His early ambition of publishing a book has been achieved with help from the tidal Gardeen coffers. In his book, he expands on his ideas which are known to us from The Zoo Keeper. Whilst an attack on those who live off poverty is nothing like as lucrative as lambasting religion, Ellis continues to round on an industry which, courtesy of the salary of Su, keeps him in single malt. We see through his eyes as Su peers into the abyss and are privy to his thoughts as he prepares to look for alternative accommodation. It is given to Ellis to present the last word on urban community development.

Brimswall prefers to carve out a possibility rather than present a watertight resolution to particular strands of the storyline. Just as in real life, there are some things we can’t know for absolutely sure, and this is deliberately the case with regard to Fiona Kemp-Davies. Here’s a technique that leaves something to reader imagination.

Competent writing and quality storytelling, then. The central characters of the Zoo Keeper novels are not meant to be unreservedly likeable. Also, the contents of the trilogy may well be informative but there is little in the way of social optimism. On the other hand, the all-important page turning factor is present. These are books that lodge in the memory.

May 2009