Estote ergo prudentes sicut serpentes, et simplices sicut columbae. – ‘Therefore be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.’ — Matthew X, 6

County Wicklow, 1954. It’s the centenary of when the Catholic church promulgated the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, and so now a so-called Marian year is declared by the pope to focus the faithful’s attention on God’s ability to create a special individual free from the stain of sin.

But the Archbishop of Dublin puts it to his protégé Ignatius Flood that in the Wicklow hills another kind of creation is going on, one that is wickedly sinful: the making of things that give the appearance of living and breathing creatures, the unholy fabrication of simulacra.

But when the young novitiate priest gets to the isolated farmhouse and meets its inhabitants how is he to judge what he finds? Who is the creator, who the creature? Will he ever discover the truth when everything around him seems to be in flux?

Simulacrum is a taut, claustrophobic tale mostly set in high summer at a smallholding situated a few miles from Blessington and Ballyknockan, not far from the lakes on the River Liffey. The farm is owned by Mrs Quinn, an aged widow who’s confined to her wheelchair; it also houses her young niece Eileen, with the farm’s livestock managed by Tommy Byrne. Flood, who goes to stay there under the pretext of recuperating from a physical attack, suspects first one individual, then another, of being the human simulacrum designed by Mrs Quinn.

But he’s also extremely susceptible to the presence of Eileen and finds himself being by turns attracted to and then repulsed by her. Then into the ménage steps a larger than life itinerant sheep-shearer called Flaherty who soon sets himself up as a rival for Eileen’s attentions. To further confuse matters, Flood increasingly finds his grasp of time and space compromised, losing calendar days and somehow discovering a previously nonexistent room on the property. We start to doubt, as he does too, the reliability of his perception.

This is a wonderfully creepy novella that deals not just with facsimiles but also with flux. For example the name of the Liffey – a river the crossing of which signifies change in the story – may derive from a Celtic root which, like the Welsh llif, not only suggests water flowing but also a flooding; and this seems to characterise Flood’s own vascillations as he swings between mood and decision, emotion and action.

Even those with little or no Latin can glean the sense of Flood’s quotes from pre-Vatican Council rubrics, cited in Flood’s narrative as authoritative commentary on his journal entries; but through them the author highlights a paradox, for they capture the novitiate’s constant prevarication and indecision, which merely succeeds in further entangling him in the web woven in the Wicklow hills. It doesn’t take much for the reader to get similarly enmeshed.

Fallon’s writing is assured, reflecting on the contrasts between perception and reality, between theology and superstition, between sophistry and sophistication. In many respects this fiction reminded me of Hilary Mantel’s Fludd, which was also set in a rural Catholic community (this time in Derbyshire, featuring an enigmatic curate): Simulacrum has the same brooding Gothic atmosphere as Mantel’s 1989 novella, challenging the reader to doubt what’s certain and what isn’t. Its development and denouement are however very different: as a supernatural thriller it stands its own ground, and does so convincingly and effectively. ( )