Content warnings: Internalised homophobia. Use of the word sodomite (historically appropriate, but still pretty awful in its impact).

Briarley is the story you get if Beauty’s father had been a country parson with enough backbone to tell the Beast no, and enough compassion to stay with the Beast in his daughter’s place. It is touching and kind and charming, and often very funny, and I was absolutely delighted by it.

There was once a country parson with a game leg from the Somme, who lived in a honey-coloured parsonage with his daughter, the most beautiful girl in the world…

Lost in the woods one night, the parson takes shelter from the storm in a beautiful, apparently deserted, mansion. But he knows his folklore, and when he finds a feast laid out before him, with not a soul to be seen, he immediately turns around and leaves, thanking the air as he goes. The parson is not a superstitious man, but he is also not fool enough to eat fairy food, or to be rude to any magical, invisible creature that might be watching.

Alas, he is fool enough – or fond enough of his daughter – to pluck a rose as he leaves, and that, of course, is enough. A dragon immediately appears, accuses him of theft, and demands his daughter in recompense. But the parson refuses to buy his freedom, or even his life, at such a price, and the dragon is not prepared to kill him just yet. And so the story begins.

The dragon and his servants, we learn, once turned away a beggar-woman on a cold night, and learned the hard way that she was an enchantress. They have been cursed for a period of one hundred years, and nobody is quite sure what will happen at the end of that time. They only know that it is coming up quite soon, and that to break the curse, the dragon must learn to love and be loved in return. Thus the desire to acquire the parson’s daughter.

The parson, a practical man, suggests a puppy instead. Puppies, he points out, are almost impossible not to love.

“At the very least, a puppy will give you something to do other than mope.”

The parson is a delightful character. He is kind and self-aware, and he has a gift for seeing people as people, even when those people are invisible, or are dragons. He is also quietly courageous. He doesn’t make a fuss about standing up to the dragon; it’s just that it really isn’t possible for him to give someone his daughter, and it’s as simple as that. He has a gently ironic sense of humour which appealed to me greatly. And he has a tendency to wander off into discussions of literature and theology, as you might expect.

“You’re going about this all wrong,” he said. He spoke with some asperity – more than he would have allowed himself if he were speaking to one of his parishioners; but then none of his parishioners had ever kidnapped him. “That’s not how you learn to love, not at all. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it does not kidnap–”

“You’re misquoting,” the dragon interrupted. “Paul doesn’t say anything about kidnapping.”

“So you do know your First Corinthians, after all,” the parson said. The dragon glared, and the parson gripped the table and went on. “I am paraphrasing. I believe the injunction against kidnapping is implied by all the rest of it.”

“If you know your Bible so well,” the dragon said, “then you know the Bible tells you not to steal.”

Briarley is set in England in 1940, with the Battle of Britain being fought overhead. While the War is present in the story, it is mostly visible in the parson’s way of looking at the world around him. When he first arrives at the mansion, the well-kept grounds immediately draw his disapproval, because clearly the master of the house has kept his servants at home rather than releasing them to the war effort. He is as taken aback by the presence of roast beef at the Beast’s table as he is by the empty silence of the house when he arrives. With rationing in place, not even the wealthy can afford to sit down to a roast! And early in his stay at the mansion he keeps thinking of how it might be used for the war – perhaps as a place for children from London to stay, or for convalescent soldiers.

But one of the subtler magics of the curse on the Beast and his home is a sort of forgetfulness of time, and the War recedes from view as the parson becomes more embedded in the household. It is only late in the book that the War once again intrudes into the story, and one thing I loved was the ambiguity of the magic here. It is uncertain whether the war and the present are intruding because the curse is reaching its end, for better or worse, or whether the actions of the characters have somehow weakened that curse, which allows the outside world to seep in. Was the curse protecting the dragon and his servants even as it kept them in stasis? Or is the war’s incursion on the story part of the curse itself, and the catalysing event that will decide whether the curse is fulfilled or broken? I liked the way these questions remained unanswered, or could be answered in a myriad of ways. Magic that explains itself too tidily doesn’t feel like magic to me.

I also loved the writing in this story. For the first half, the parson and the dragon are nameless. This gives them an archetypal feel, like characters in a traditional fairy tale. It means that when they do finally introduce themselves properly, and begin to use each other’s names, something has changed in the story, and in the way they see each other. It carries great emotional impact. I would also note that this story is definitely more fairy tale than romance – while the romance is present, it is sketched in quite lightly. The friendship carries a lot more weight.

As the tale is told from the viewpoint of the parson, with occasional interludes from his daughter, Rose, we see the dragon and his servants only from his perspective. The dragon was a very young man when he was cursed, and we learn that he was handsome, wealthy, and rather spoiled. He is very intelligent, but rather prone to dramatics and sulking. (In his defense, a century-long curse and the certainty that nobody loved him enough to try to come to his aid would make a drama llama out of most people.) The dragon is also consumed by guilt – he feels responsible for his servants’ fate, though in fact it becomes clear as the book progresses that the servants themselves are not without their part in the initial actions that caused the curse.

And there is an extra dose of guilt, because the dragon believes that the curse can only be broken by a very specific definition of love, and he knows he likely will not fall in love with a woman. I liked that the book addressed the dragon’s misconception head on, with compassion and acceptance. The parson is bisexual, and has loved and lost twice; first, his friend and lover, Rupert, who died during the war, and later his wife, Emily. He is now in his forties or thereabouts, and while he is technically far younger than the dragon, he has lived his life in the world and not in the stasis of a fairytale curse. And being a thoughtful man, he has used this time to come to terms with himself and his sexuality.

“What I know,” the parson said, “is that it was the love of Rupert Spiles that taught me how to love […]. I could not have loved my wife Emily, or my daughter Rose, or my parishioners, or indeed loved you, if I had not learned through Rupert Spiles how to fulfill the commandment and love another as myself.”

For the parson, there is no sin in selflessly loving another, whatever the church or wider society might think, and physical love is a part of that.

The slowly growing friendship and intimacy between parson and dragon is at the heart of this story. While they begin as enemies, the parson, having refused to render up his daughter, feels that he has a duty to stay and help the dragon and his household break free of the curse. And he quickly becomes fond of them all, and is wryly amused by the dragon’s thwarted vanity and tendency to brood. He and the dragon are great foils for each other, and when the dragon begins to tease him back, it’s quite adorable.

The friendship isn’t a one-way street, either. The dragon needs to learn how to love as well as to be loved, and the parson is the only person around who can show him how that works. But to do so, he cannot merely be a mentor who reaches a hand down to help the dragon up. He needs to become the friend who sits side by side with the dragon, who enters into his feelings rather than trying to fix the problem, and who shows him by example that it is safe to share his vulnerabilities by first exposing his own. And this is something the parson needs in his own right: he is good at caring for others, but there are many things he simply has not been able to share with anyone before. Some of the conversations, particularly around Rupert, felt like setting down burdens that had been carried for a very long time. And the dragon recognises this for the gift that it is.

I adore a good fairy tale retelling, and Briarley is an excellent one – thoughtful, sweet, funny, and eerie. I love that the parson and his daughter and the servants have very concrete, everyday preoccupations – rationing, managing a game leg, looking after a mobility-impaired dog, all the things that go into keeping their little corner of the world running. And yet they are living in a castle surrounded by magical roses, in the service of a dragon, under a curse which feels all the more threatening precisely because of the very familiarity of their daily concerns.

But what I loved best was the way Briarley took the story of Beauty and the Beast to places I had never imagined, yet which seem somehow inevitable, as though the story was always meant to be written this way. It is a deeply, deeply satisfying story. I loved it.