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Convent Under Siege: The Maiden of All Our Desires

20 Monday Jun 2022

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Review: The Maiden of All Our Desires, by Peter Manseau
Arcade, 2022. 327 pp. $27

Somewhere in midfourteenth-century England, the plague ravages the populace, as it does elsewhere in Europe. A remote convent, deliberately secluded to discourage visitors, secular or ecclesiastic, is under siege—from the threat of infection, yes, but two other forces as well. One is a snowstorm the like of which nobody can recall seeing, and which feels and looks apocalyptic. The third threat, perhaps the most serious, arrives from above in a different sense: The bishop, having heard rumors of heresy at the convent, is coming to investigate.

Nobody dares talk about the danger, and the abbess, Mother John (many of the nuns have taken masculine names, according to which religious figures inspire them), seems to deny any peril at all. But around her lurks the fear that wherever a bishop looks for heresy, he’ll find it. Moreover, he may not have far to look, for the convent, especially Mother John and those she influences most strongly, puts much faith in the sayings of the previous abbess, Ursula. For instance: “Birds see all but say nothing we can understand, which make them a perfect symbol of the divine.”

You see the problem here: Since when is a woman’s philosophy meaningful, particularly if it replaces standard (read: created by men) dogma? Mother John would object to the accusation of replacement, arguing that her beliefs coexist with those of the church. However, her outlook, though scrupulously devout, seems based on common sense — rather refreshing, if you ask me, and perhaps most modern readers would agree.

But nobody’s asking us, or anyone else, for the spirit of inquiry is precisely the problem. A good fourteenth-century Christian is supposed to obey, not think, let alone question. And the manuscripts of Ursula’s that Mother John refuses to get rid of could send her and many others to the stake.

Consequently, The Maiden of All Our Desires deals with where faith comes from, what it means, and how the earthly world gets in the way. The Department of Earthly Delights has its ambassador in Father Francis, the priest who hears the women’s confessions and performs other necessary sacraments, but who might have preferred to follow wood carving as a career, and who has known forbidden pleasures. That means he has secrets to keep and sins for which to atone.

A working water mill in Lyme Regis, UK. An ingenious mill wheel figures in the novel (courtesy Zephyris, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

The novel purports to unfold over the course of one day, divided into the various prayer services–matins, lauds, prime, and so forth. Umberto Eco followed a similar framework in The Name of the Rose, though at greater length and with greater coherence. In Manseau’s novel, it’s not always immediately clear when events happen, the day of the snowstorm or in the past, but bet on the latter, and you’ll be right most often.

Back story rules, which can be difficult to sort out, but stay with it. There’s much here to enjoy. A different literary conceit, from the publisher (not the author), invokes Matrix and Hamnet, among other comparisons, which proves, once again, that the publicist’s favorite game provides the surest way to minimize in glibness each book’s essence or meaning. What else would you expect from a soundbite?

That said, having loved both those other books, I see a resemblance, though not because Matrix involves an abbess. It’s the tactile prose.

She reached out timidly to touch the crucifix, to be certain of what she saw. With two cracked, scratching fingers, her hands shaking like a bride’s, she moved down the leg from knee to ankle. The wood was cold and smooth, carved perfectly. She traced her fingers along the rounded line that joined the legs, and felt the angles that made its curve: numberless angles, like a tiny and perfect mountain range; peaks formed meticulously by a skilled hand and the finest of edges, undetectable by sight, but so apparent to the touch. She felt too the grain of the wood and the remnants of rings, the signature of the tree this once had been.

A typical passage, this. Throughout the novel, Manseau’s descriptions reveal inner life, setting, and conflict. It’s reason enough to read the book, but consider also the story, which, despite the occasionally confusing time frames, keeps you riveted and offers a satisfying ending. As for characters, Mother John and Ursula come through, but I would have liked more differentiation among the nuns, other than their petty rivalries.

Further, it’s curious how Father Francis commands an outsize presence in this community of women, though perhaps that results from the necessities of plot and the importance to it of earthly desire. Nevertheless, Manseau, curator of religion at the Smithsonian Institution, knows his ground thoroughly and has written a thought-provoking, engaging, and entertaining novel.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

An Unreliable Priest: The Western Wind

28 Monday Jan 2019

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Review: The Western Wind, by Samantha Harvey
Grove, 2018. 294 pp. $26

It’s 1491, and John Reve, priest at the English village of Oakham, faces political and social problems for which his religious studies couldn’t have prepared him. During Shrovetide, just before Lent, Thomas Newman drowns in the flood-swollen river, and his body hasn’t been found, only part of his shirt.

Since he didn’t confess or receive last rites, his soul may not enter heaven. Also, as Oakham’s richest resident, he owned most of the farm and grazing land, whose disposition hangs in the balance. If Newman died a suicide, his property will revert to the crown, which would destroy Oakham. But the village hasn’t prospered in years, a circumstance that covetous monks at a nearby abbey are planning to use as a pretext to take over, so if the death is accidental, they can argue that Oakham is so disordered, it failed to care for even its wealthiest inhabitant.

Accordingly, Father Reve, known as a benevolent presence in Oakham, must see justice done to Newman, his friend and most important parishioner, while protecting the villagers and their interests. Reve’s chief obstacle is his immediate superior, the church dean, a sour, unpleasant sort who takes up residence in Newman’s house, insists that the case must be murder, and orders Reve to find the killer via the confessional. Finding a sacrificial lamb, the dean says, is the only way to save Oakham.

Detail from The Fight between Carnival and Lent, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1559 (courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, via Wikimedia Commons)

Such an everyday tragedy — a man drowns in a river — yet the pressures and tensions that result are complex beyond imagining. I admire such deceptively simple premises, which allow deep exploration of universal themes through a tiny, specific incident. Through Reve’s first-person narration, Harvey covers an astonishing array of subjects, among them man’s relation to God; whether truth varies with circumstance; what modern thinking means; and principle versus expediency. Reve, for all his dedication, has more than a dash of free thinker in him, one reason Newman fascinates him. The dead man traveled widely, brought back religious art from Italy, and had a way of thinking for himself in religious matters. He’s a harbinger of the Renaissance, therefore, as his name, “new man,” suggests, while Reve evokes the French rêve, or “dream.”

Fitting these ideas within the frame of the mystery, the politics, and the religious rituals re-creates fifteenth-century English rural life in limpid detail. You grasp the outlook, fears, occupations, and mores of these humble folk, and though it seems effortless, that’s a tribute to Harvey’s economical storytelling and her mellifluous prose:

We know there are no wolf-men and no sea creatures of that kind; it’s children who believe in those. There are only spirits — ill-meaning spirits, who live as we all do on God’s earth but aren’t made by God. This is no secret to us, and men much sharper than me have proven it. The spirits are here on earth to test and strengthen us; when things die and decay, the decaying matter that has no home in heaven emits a fetid cloud of minuscule spirited matter that brings illness of all kinds — of the body, of our fates.

Casting off the supernatural only leads to other fancies, an irony of which Reve has no inkling. That those fancies would last until Pasteur underlines how stubborn and backward humans can be, even when they think they’re enlightened—an idea worth deeper reflection.

So breathtaking is The Western Wind that for most of it, I thought I was reading one of the best novels I’ve picked up in years — until page 235, to be precise. Then, almost four-fifths of the way through, Harvey plays a trick. Father Reve has a secret or three that he hasn’t revealed in his narration up to then, and which he now confesses, returning to an earlier point in the story. The writing remains brilliant, the story gripping, and if anything, more complex.

And yet, I resent what Harvey’s done as unfair, manipulative, and ungenerous. I remember no clue in the early chapters that Reve is an unreliable narrator, though this particular unreliability has to do with omission. Having earned my trust and convinced me that Reve possesses certain qualities, Harvey unwraps a version of, “Fooled you.”

I might have expected that had the narrative proceeded like Rashomon, the classic Kurosawa film about an incident told from several perspectives, each yielding a different interpretation. But here, Reve is the only narrator, so that to challenge my perceptions, he “forgets” or “neglects” to include certain facts.

The Western Wind is a thought-provoking tale, perhaps even more so that Reve has hidden layers. I only wish that the storytelling didn’t rest, in part, on a gimmick.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Full Life in a Small Room: The Anchoress

20 Monday Aug 2018

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Review: The Anchoress, by Robyn Cadwallader
FSG, 2015. 310 pp. $26

It’s 1255 in Hortham, Gloucestershire, and seventeen-year-old Sarah takes a vow to live a solitary life of penitence and prayer. She is to pray for Sir Thomas Maunsell, the lord who has granted her the living; the churchmen; and the villagers. Only women may look at her — her maids, and any women or girls who seek her counsel — and the only man who may speak to her is her confessor, Father Peter, who must do so with a curtain separating them.

What a simple premise, so simple that some readers might suppose that The Anchoress consists of interior monologues that pale by page 50. On the contrary. This gorgeous, utterly compelling novel proves, once again, that tension resides not in plot points but the conflict between an inner life and everything else. And here, everything else is plenty, starting with Sarah’s motives in renouncing the world.

A sign marking the cell of a fourteenth-century anchoress of Shere, Surrey (courtesy Suzanne Knights, Wikimedia Commons)

At first, you know only that she believes firmly in God and church teachings, and likens her vocation to an acrobat she once saw, who risked himself flying through the air, and whom she has privately nicknamed Swallow. She imagines her isolation as a risk too, rather than escape. That’s Sarah’s independent spirit showing — yes, even within the strict confines of prayer and meditation, she roams a world no one else dreams of. Of course, there’s more to her decision than faith or fancy. Add her merchant father’s desire to marry her off for commercial advantage, her sister’s death in childbirth, and a dash of teenage cussedness, and you see that Hortham’s new anchoress is no retiring maiden content to nod her pretty head to those who purport to know better.

To no surprise, Sarah’s story quickly becomes one of justice, questioning authority (divine or temporal), the nature of sin and whether women are to blame for it, and the lord’s rights over his vassals. Does Cadwallader push the boundaries of modernity a little? Maybe; at times these thirteenth-century folk seem to reason from a mindset of a later era. Yet Sarah’s emotional and intellectual growth feels completely plausible — this novel, among other things, is a coming-of-age story — and the transitions are never easy. For all that plausibility, however, Sarah’s native intelligence should have prepared her for at least one surprise that the reader figures out long before she does, but that’s a rare slip-up in an otherwise seamless narrative.

You’d expect that a person enclosed in a tiny space would have an intensely physical existence, and that’s true from the start:

I walked the length of myself in the wall with two windows to my altar, counting my steps — nine paces; that across the narrower side, from my fireplace to my squint — seven paces. This would be my world. I touched the squint, a thin window about the length of my two hands from fingertips to heel and as wide as my wrist. I knelt and looked through. It was so narrow and cut on such a sharp angle in the thick church wall that I could see only the church’s altar, its two lighted candles, and the crucifix above.

The strength of The Anchoress is how Cadwallader carries the physical throughout, in concrete, evocative language, using small moments to full effect. The nails that seal Sarah’s outer door represent, to her, the Crucifixion. She begins to see faces in the uneven surfaces of the stone wall surrounding her and imagines the two anchoresses who preceded her, hearing their voices. Images reappear, as with the juggler who made such an impression on her, and with birds that nest on her roof (birds, as symbols of innocence and freedom, matter here). These metaphors slide gently in and out of the narrative, so subtly rendered I had to remind myself that The Anchoress is a first novel.

Sarah expects that abstention from ordinary life will release her from sensations, desires, and anything earthbound. How wrong she is. A glimpse of sunlight, the nestling of the cat who insists on adopting her, the voices of the women who visit (as well as what they say) affect Sarah all the more profoundly for being unusual to her. Her scope may be a tiny sphere, but it’s jam-packed. As her second confessor, Father Ranaulf (who narrates part of the story) observes in a different context, “A woman sealed in a cell, that was all. How could it become so complicated?”

Complicated, indeed, and with an ending perhaps a bit too neat. But spinning the straw of slight circumstance into narrative gold is the novelist’s art, and The Anchoress is one of the best examples I’ve read in a while.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Murder in Troubled Times: Beyond Absolution

27 Monday Nov 2017

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Review: Beyond Absolution, by Cora Harrison
Severn, 2017. 249 pp. $29

Cork, 1923. Father Dominic, a much-loved Capuchin friar, is found dead in the confessional at Holy Trinity Church. Someone has killed him with a weapon thin enough to pass through the grille separating penitent from confessor, and sharp and long enough to penetrate his brain through his listening ear. Reverend Mother Aquinas, who runs a convent school and knows everyone in Cork, grew up friends with Father Dominic and his brother, Lawrence, also in holy orders. Though respectful of Inspector Patrick Cashman, the detective assigned to the case, and aware that solving the murder is his job, the Reverend Mother brings her keen faculties and web of contacts to bear, hoping to aid the overworked inspector.

The first question is whether the late priest had heard too much–and, given how he died, the metaphor is inescapable. But the secrets of the confessional are never divulged, so there was no chance that Father Dominic betrayed a confidence and paid for it. Nevertheless, shortly before his death, he visited an up-and-coming antique shop and saw something there that agitated him. Since he was no collector–couldn’t be, considering his vow of poverty–why he went there raises more questions than it answers. What’s more, the owner of the antique shop, Peter Doyle, has a little explaining to do. Witnesses say they saw him at Holy Trinity at the time of the murder; but he says he wasn’t, and since he’s Protestant, he had no reason to go there.

However, there’s something about him that doesn’t quite square. A theatrical group that he runs, which is preparing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, contains a raft of people who seem to have plenty of money to spend, no matter what their occupation. What connection that has to the murder is anyone’s guess, but suffice to say that every cast member of the Mikado becomes a suspect. But what motive would they have to kill a much-loved priest?

Then again, no one is entirely beloved, and Father Dominic ventured into prisons to give the sacraments to incarcerated IRA soldiers. The agreement made the previous year to grant Ireland independence, minus the six northern counties, has pleased practically nobody, and the violence continues. Accordingly, the priest’s death becomes a political issue, as do the religious affiliations and family lineages of almost every character in the novel.

Auxiliaries and “Black and Tans” fought the IRA and earned the undying enmity of Irish nationalists (courtesy National Library of Ireland via Wikimedia Commons)

I like this aspect of Beyond Absolution. Harrison re-creates the mutual suspicion and prejudice that crops up in or lies beneath the surface of every human transaction. She betrays the loyalties to client, faith, class, or brand of nationalism and how they seep through life and color how people make decisions. You see divisions within the police, the educational system, and the church. Since the dominant ethic seems to be based on tradition, fear, and suspicion, you get the feeling that the sensitive, forward-thinking characters–the Reverend Mother, Inspector Cashman, and a few others–are trying to hold back the ocean. In another nice touch, the Reverend Mother once taught Cashman, so she has a personal stake in wanting him to succeed; likewise, she can recall how several other characters behaved as students of hers.

Gossip is the grease that makes this world go round, and even the telephone calls may not be private, as the Reverend Mother well knows:

There were, she supposed, other countries where the exchange operators took a number in silence and put you through, preserving an air of total anonymity about the process, but here in the city of Cork, that would have been considered discourteous. In Cork, it was assumed that everyone knew everyone else’s business. And the telephone exchange women did their best to add to that common pool of knowledge. Sensible people, keeping this in mind, spent the first minutes exchanging remarks about the weather and the state of the streets before moving on to matters that were more private.

As for the mystery, Harrison tells her story well and keeps you guessing–at least about most things. It’s a little too easy to tell the good guys and bad guys apart–as with Peter Doyle, the characterizations can be one-sided–and the antique-store crowd are a bad lot, which narrows the field quite a bit. You may not guess the killer’s identity, but the motive quickly becomes obvious. Sometimes, Harrison clumsily introduces facts she wants you to know or character background. At those moments, I felt I was being Told Something Important rather than being allowed to discover it naturally.

Still, I appreciate Harrison’s skill at re-creating an era, and I applaud her decision not to try to clean it up. The Troubles were a very violent time, and she gives a glimpse of why.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.