Tag Archives: fourteenth century

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.

Dante and Derring-Do: The Master of Verona

26 Monday Jul 2021

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Review: The Master of Verona, by David Blixt
St. Martin’s, 2007. 561 pp. $28

In 1314, Verona’s master, Cangrande della Scala, extends patronage to Dante Alighieri, who has been banished from Florence, and his two surviving sons, Pietro, seventeen, and Jacopo, fourteen. The poet has recently published Inferno, to great renown and no little fear of heresy or impiety. But della Scala quickly realizes that Dante’s not the only gifted member of the family, nor the most useful.

Rather, he fixes on Pietro, who longs to escape his father’s shadow (while hoping pater will actually notice him one day and approve). And when Pietro falls in with two other youths — one noble, one from a merchant family pretending nobility — military adventure offers. Della Scala, a twenty-three-year-old wunderkind, dreams of uniting Italy under his banner. His approach to war, diplomacy, and familial politics has much to do with an ancient prophecy that says a figure called the Greyhound will realize that far-fetched scheme. He’s magnetic, generous, and apparently scrupulous, a rare combination. Pietro’s enthralled, and his passion takes him places, often alongside his new friends, the first he’s ever had in his life.

Equestrian statue, no date, of Cangrande della Scala, Museo di Castelvecchio,
Verona (courtesy Eggbread, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Between the derring-do, battle scenes, court intrigue, and the question of occupying many thinkers on the cusp of the Renaissance — do the stars foretell fate, or does free will have influence? — The Master of Verona makes for epic adventure. The thrumming plot, larger-than-life characters and perilous twists and turns evoke an approach like that of Dumas. The pages turn rapidly, numerous though they are. Astrology, poetry, chivalry, prophecy, and love figure here, all entertaining subjects, and I enjoy many of the characters, who take them seriously.

Besides Pietro and della Scala’s sister, Katerina, I particularly like Dante himself, who unfortunately drops out of the narrative. Blixt portrays him as a self-absorbed narcissist conscious of his genius who has little time for his children, except when they disappoint him. The exception? His daughter, Antonia, who, at thirteen, keeps the booksellers in line and acts as self-appointed caretaker of her father’s career. In letters, he calls her Beatrice, which she treasures. Katerina and Antonia are women ahead of their time, seeking power and influence denied them because of their gender.

Otherwise, the novel has wars, a horse race through the streets, trysts, duels, and every action conceivable. Not all are credible, and Pietro’s powers can test belief, especially as he’s received little schooling in the martial arts; but never mind. As an added conceit, Shakespearean characters and situations waft through the narrative, whether the plays belong to Vienna (Romeo and Juliet), or not (Othello, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing). Note that Blixt is an actor and director, and you can tell: His approach is theatrical, to say the least.

As a storyteller, he offers brio, panache, and a command of historical detail:

Inside the city walls, the streets were all but impassable. Spectators, gamblers, merchants, peasants, petitioners — all had traveled for days to vie for what lodging they could find. The decent rooms were already rented out to triple or quadruple capacity.… Many visitors, even noble ones, were forced to sleep on dirty floors, or in stables, where the beds were somewhat more comfortable. But fully half the people in the city were not sleeping. Other attractions called — treats and spectacles and mythical beasts, lights and sounds and smells.

However, as this passage suggests, Blixt sometimes trowels on the detail, drawing back the authorial focus and distancing the reader. This narrative technique, which can seem static, undermines the drive he achieves with the storyline and makes you work to stay connected. The author also indulges in information dumps, swelling the dialogue with facts and background, at which the reader’s eye grows impatient. Or this reader’s does. If these facts matter to the story, and I’m not sure they always do, better to show them through action, rather than have people explain them to each other.

I doubt fourteenth-century people, or those anytime, would speak the way Blixt has it, unless they’re all pedants. Then again, these folk often think like moderns, however intently they hew to the philosophical framework of their era. Present-day vocabulary dots the dialogue, and when characters discourse on various subjects, they occasionally refer to knowledge that lies in the future. They also speak incorrect French, admittedly a minor quibble, though indicative of carelessness of writer or editor that emerges elsewhere.

But it’s the discursive, lecturing quality that hampers the novel most. The final chapters are particularly striking for that, as the narrative struggles to wrap up convolutions and contradictions through speechmaking. It’s an unsatisfying, melodramatic conclusion.

For a wild, evocative ride, in which action carries the day, The Master of Verona makes for entertaining reading. Less would have achieved more.

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

Life As Theater: Morality Play

12 Monday Oct 2020

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Review: Morality Play, by Barry Unsworth
Doubleday, 1995. 206 pp. $16

On a cold December day during the second half of the fourteenth century, Nicholas Barber steals upon a group of traveling players who stand away from a dying man, one of their number. Fascinated by the players’ wordless empathy, Nicholas watches too long, and they spot him and demand that he come forward. It’s a dangerous time in England, where the plague rides again, and suspicion and fear influence every interaction, not least with vagabonds.

But Nicholas is a vagabond himself, a priest who has left his diocese without permission. He has abandoned his good cloak in a house where he was committing adultery, and knows his way with a pair of dice in his hand. And when the actors move on toward Durham, where they are to perform Nativity plays for the lord’s court, Nicholas accompanies them.

He could have said that they’d just lost a man they need to replace. But Nicholas is also burning a bridge. The bishop of Lincoln, his patron, might take him back if he turned around right then and honestly repented his lapses. But appearing on stage violates the law. And though that scares him, Nicholas can’t resist — something about playing a part, belonging to the small, tightly knit troupe, has touched him.

However, the next village they happen on has recently witnessed a murder; a young boy has been killed, and a deaf-mute young woman sentenced to hang for it. Martin, the leader of the troupe, convinces the others to perform a play based on the killing, as it has been recounted in rumor and disputation around the village. To do so risks severe punishment, for, on stage as in life, truth comes only from God, and the players, already at society’s margin, will overstep if they pretend to interpret their world — and a profane event, no less. Nicholas, understanding the religious proscription intuitively, is appalled. But the show, as always, must go on.

Frontispiece to Wynkyn de Worde’s 1522 edition of the morality play Mundus et Infans (courtesy G. A. Lester, ed., Three Late Medieval Morality Plays, via Wikimedia Commons)

What a premise, as elegant as you could want. And what a title, literally evoking the medieval mystery play while figuratively showing the changeable nature of moral choices. Further, what the medieval mind called a mystery had to do with Scripture and God’s actions, ever inscrutable. But here we have that framework and an actual mystery alongside, which the performance of the play helps to solve.

I have read this novel several times over the past decade or two, and it remains among my favorites. Most people, if they’ve read Unsworth, will point to Sacred Hunger as his masterpiece, and it’s hard to disagree. Yet Morality Play has so much to say about the role that subsumes the player, not just the other way around, involving so many aspects of private, political, and social life, that I’m in awe.

Success here hinges on the characters, and you’d have to look hard and long before you found a more finely drawn ensemble, literally and figuratively. Besides Nicholas, whose desires outstrip his common sense (which makes him human), you have Martin, teacher, leader, and group conscience; Straw, the outwardly fragile, gifted mime; Stephen, the brooding drunk with a commanding presence; and others, each sustained in-depth without more than a line or two of backstory. Together, they create an amazing performance.

Then there’s Unsworth’s prose, simple, highly physical, conveying the time and place from the inside out. Among other things, the medieval theater comes to life in full panoply, as with a performance of the play of Adam, in which Nicholas changes roles between the Devil’s Fool and a normal one:

I shook my bells and struck the tambourine as I went back through the people. I was a different person now, they did not hate me. They knew me for a japer, not a demon. I understood then, as I passed through the people and shook my bells and saw them smile, what all players come to know very well, how quickly shifting are our loves and hates, how they depend on mocks and disguises. With a horned mask and a wooden trident I was their fear of hell fire. Two minutes later, still the same timorous creature as before, with a fool’s cap and a white mask, I was their hope of laughter. I was discovering also the danger of disguise for the player. A mask confers the terror of freedom, it is very easy to forget who you are. I felt it now, this slipping of the soul…

Morality Play is a work of genius, a mirror on human nature in the fourteenth century and now.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book for my bookshelf, where it has pride of place.

Burning Reason: The Name of the Rose

01 Monday Jul 2019

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Review: The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
Houghton Mifflin, 2014 [1980, 1983] 579 pp. $16

As Brother William of Baskerville, an English Franciscan monk, nears the Italian abbey where he’s to attend a conclave, he correctly deduces from tracks in the snow and other minute details that the party of brethren approaching him on the road are seeking a horse — whose name he also guesses. Naturally, this astonishes both the search party and William’s companion, his scribe, a German novice named Adso. It also pleases the abbot, who’s delighted to have so keen an observer on hand, because a young monk has died under suspicious circumstances, and the mystery must be solved before the conclave takes place in a few days’ time.

Or, to be precise, the abbot seems pleased, but the readily apparent struggle between truth and expediency dividing the abbey’s occupants, heightened by the anticipated high-level meeting, clouds his motives. The year is 1327, and the church is fighting itself, with one pope in Rome, and the other in Avignon. The expected French envoys — and, menacingly, their accompanying armed force — include a charismatic, unscrupulous inquisitor whom William knows and fears; he was once an inquisitor himself but gave it up because he felt the entire process of hunting heretics was irrational and unjust. Since then, he has openly avowed the empirical philosophy of Roger Bacon and William Occam (he of the famous razor), beliefs that unsettle many other monks and, in their eyes, skate dangerously close to heresy.

Pope John XXII, a protégé of the French crown, lived a princely life in Avignon and opposed the Franciscan doctrine of poverty (image by an unknown nineteenth-century painter; courtesy Palais des Papes, Avignon, via Wikimedia Commons)

Moreover, the abbot has forbidden William to investigate the library stacks, labyrinthine rooms that no one save the librarian himself may enter. This restriction cripples William’s efforts, particularly after more monks die, and he supposes that a hidden text holds the key. So, with Adso in tow, he invades the abbey’s sanctum sanctorum, with ever-startling results.

Adso makes a superb narrator and foil, a Watson scared of where knowledge will lead, to William’s Holmes, who thinks knowledge itself can be neither good nor evil. A weighty theme, and The Name of the Rose tips the scales at almost 600 pages, but Eco does a brilliant job focusing on two issues that, at first glance, seem too ridiculous to kill for, whether for personal motives, to serve the church, or for reasons of state. First, did Christ ever laugh? And second, did he and his apostles choose poverty, the belief on which the Franciscan order rests?

But the narrative, if at length, shows why these questions matter in 1327 and today. If Christ did not laugh, the official reasoning goes, satire, jokes, and humor are either vile, a threat to faith, or both. However, William argues that if a devout person must have only a certain sober, humorless mind, then the inquisitors rule, as in fact they do, and the crucial precept of accepting faith through free will ceases to exist. As William warns Adso, “The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.”

The question of poverty has a more immediate political implication. The Franciscan order has splintered, prompting rebellions against church power, to which the church has responded by burning heretics, charging the use of magic, and accusing their opponents of free love and appalling butchery. But as William tells Adso, the rebels don’t care about church doctrines, especially; they resent the extreme wealth of the church and the regimes it supports, both of which contribute to keep the poor as they are.

Amid all this, monks continue to die, and William must divert his efforts from solving the mystery to play politician during the conclave, standing up for his beliefs while avoiding condemnation. As you may have figured out by now (how did I give it away?), The Name of the Rose is a discursive book, but no less mesmerizing for that:

The creature behind us was apparently a monk, though his torn and dirty habit made him look like a vagabond. Unlike many of my brothers, I have never in my whole life been visited by the Devil; but I believe that if he were to appear to me one day, he would have the very features of our interlocutor. His head was hairless, not shaved in penance but as the result of the past action of some viscid eczema; the brow was so low that if he had had hair on his head it would have mingled with his eyebrows (which were thick and shaggy); the eyes were round, with tiny mobile pupils, and whether the gaze was innocent or malign I could not tell: perhaps it was both, in different moods, in flashes.

The Name of the Rose does what the best historical fiction should: illuminate the past by its own lights and therefore reveal the present. As a mystery, it is excellent; to that, add profundity and power.

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

Walking Dead: The Deepest Grave

15 Monday Oct 2018

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Review: The Deepest Grave, by Jeri Westerson
Severn House, 2018. 200 pp. $29

The waning years of the fourteenth century are a bloody time in London, it seems. Recently buried corpses have been seen traipsing about the cemetery at St. Modwen’s church, dragging their coffins. A seven-year-old has confessed to killing his best friend’s father, a wealthy cloth merchant, and a relic related to St. Modwen has disappeared from that same household.

Enter Crispin Guest, the so-called Tracker of London, who solves mysteries like these for sixpence a day. The Deepest Grave is the eleventh novel of the series featuring his adventures, but Westerson catches you up on his previous career as a knight serving John of Gaunt, when Crispin had a title, lands, and power. He lost them because he backed the wrong horse when Richard II ascended the throne. If the series goes another seven historical years, Crispin’s fortunes should improve when Henry Bolingbroke, Gaunt’s son, usurps Richard’s crown. Naturally, however, Westerson’s characters don’t know this, and just about everyone reminds Guest, in one way or another, that he’s a traitor lucky to be alive. One who’s kinder is his former lover, Philippa Walcote, mother of the boy who has confessed to murder — an impossibility, by all accounts, yet the child figures to hang unless Crispin can work his rational magic.

Renold Elstracke’s posthumous 1617 print of Dick Whittington, fourteenth-century London’s famous lord mayor, and his equally famous cat (courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London, via Wikimedia Commons)

I like Guest’s comedown, which forces our hero to earn an honest living and abide in humble conditions, with his apprentice, Jack, and Jack’s pregnant wife. This unusual ménage makes for an intriguing setup and offers opportunities that, unfortunately, Westerson fails to exploit. For instance, the narrative never delves past the surface of its disgraced protagonist’s feelings, whether as a once-favored somebody who has lost everything, or a middle-aged man who has never married. The narrative tells you straight out that he has regrets, but I wanted to see them in action, especially his struggle with them, and how others might view them. Further, he’s too decent to chafe at his reduced circumstances, which I find unrealistic and a shame. Anyone of any era would have strong feelings about falling from grace, and this is the fourteenth century, when venality’s the rule rather than the exception.

But Westerson has a different agenda. Character doesn’t drive The Deepest Grave, which is fine, but I wish it were harder to tell the good guys from the bad, or that her people showed more than a single, overriding trait. Also, a few interactions Crispin has when he’s not solving crimes feel predictable and pat; I’d like this book a whole lot better if his private life were messier.

What all this adds up to is a generic feel, which I see echoed in the prose:

He was able to enjoy the night, the stars peeking in and out of the cloud cover, wisping across the night sky between the tall buildings. The glittering stars marched ahead of them on a cloudy trail. The shops and houses were blue in the falling light. Only the wealthier houses had gleaming candles shining through glass windows. The rest were barred with shutters, with only a stripe or two of light.

To me, paragraphs like these—the only exterior descriptions in the novel–give little sense of London or fourteenth-century English life. I get that the sky is cloudy, but I don’t really visualize it, or what Guest thinks about it; and that sky could have been there yesterday as well as five hundred years ago. How tall were the buildings? What did the glass look like? The streets?

I’m also skeptical that Guest’s belief in reason rather than Scripture meets so little surprise or opposition, when such thinking was a burning offense. Does Jack, who grew up a thief as a young child, really quote Aristotle, as Guest does? Would a fourteenth-century man, no matter how erudite or educated, link the heart to the pumping of blood? (Westerson could have made that point a different way, but the phrasing jumped out at me.)

Nevertheless, The Deepest Grave has its charms. Westerson integrates the two stories, the churchyard walks and the merchant’s murder, with skill and economy. She deftly employs “no — and furthermore,” so that nothing comes too easily for Crispin, who makes mistakes. Unlike Crispin the man, the Tracker of London follows a less predictable path, and the puzzles will keep you guessing.

The Deepest Grave makes thinner, less satisfying fare than other historical mysteries from Severn House, but it’s entertaining and clever in its way.

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

Rot and Corruption: Company of Liars

11 Monday Jan 2016

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Review: Company of Liars, by Karen Maitland
Delacorte, 2008. 465 pp. $24

“All England was rotting,” observes the narrator of this daring, dark, intricate novel, and there’s no arguing with him. The year is 1348, and not only has a terrifying plague cut down humans and beasts alike, torrential rains have ruined harvests. It’s a tossup which will kill first, pestilence or famine, but either way, the air stinks of decaying corpses.

Pieter Breughel the Elder's painting of the Black Death (Courtesy Museo del Prado, Madrid, via technology.org. Public domain).

Pieter Breughel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, 1562 (Courtesy Museo del Prado, Madrid, via technology.org. Public domain).

A street peddler, or camelot, who makes his living selling fake religious relics, sets off toward a town where, he believes, he has a chance to outrun the plague. Hoping to move fast, he wishes to travel alone, but happenstance dictates otherwise. The traveling party keeps growing until it numbers nine. They include a young girl with pure white hair; an Italian musician and his pupil; a sadistic con man; a young couple expecting their first child; a healer; and a young man born with one arm as a stump who believes he’s descended from swans. As the journey lengthens and becomes dangerous in ways the travelers could not have foreseen, they tell symbolic, allegorical stories about themselves.

Anyone familiar with The Canterbury Tales will recognize the intentional parallel to Chaucer’s masterpiece, so already, Company of Liars is an ambitious novel. However, those looking for the ribald comedy of the Wife of Bath or the Miller will find something else entirely, for, unlike the original, the plague and famine remain central here. Moreover, those threats, though constant, endanger the travelers less than the people do each other. As the title suggests, each has a secret to protect, and what they’ll do under those circumstances leads to terrible crimes.

Maitland, a psycholinguist with a splendid grasp of history, has portrayed this plague year in frighteningly vivid words, re-creating landscape and mindset. The mud, filth, carrion, gloom, prejudice, and fatalism leap off the pages. The absence of clerics to perform church services, the hatred leveled against Jews and foreigners, the business of selling amulets, the nightmarish rituals people perform to ward off the disease–they’re all here, and more.

The author also renders her characters in fine, believable detail, with a psychological acuity that allows her to incorporate grand themes without dragging them in by the heels. She’s got good versus evil, religion, xenophobia, superstition, injustice, and, perhaps most of all, hope.

Early on the camelot remarks:

Hope may be an illusion, but it’s what keeps you from jumping in the river or swallowing hemlock. Hope is a beautiful lie and it requires talent to create it for others. And back then on that day when they say it [the plague] first began, I truly believed that the creation of hope was the greatest of all the arts, the noblest of all the lies.

His antagonist, the sadistic con man, disagrees:

To hope is to put your faith in others and in things outside yourself; [in] that way lies betrayal and disappointment. . . . What a man needs is the certainty that he is right, no self-doubt, no fleeting thought that he might be wrong or misled. Absolute certainty that he is right–that’s what gives a man the confidence and power to do whatever he wants and to take whatever he wants from this world and the next.

I wonder whether Maitland was thinking of politicians when she wrote this, for it explains the bizarre lies told during our current election cycle better than anything else I’ve heard or read.

However, gripping as Company of Liars is, the novel tries for too much, adding a murder mystery to everything else. The narrative struggles to make all the pieces fit, playing a nonstop shell game between witchcraft and reality. Medieval folk believed implicitly in magic, so the confusion makes sense, sort of, but the camelot’s narrative voice derives from an accurately observed, realistic world. (I’m no fan of magical realism, and I like it even less when the two styles mix.) Further, the mystery fails to hold up, because the criminal’s identity is no surprise, despite skillful red herrings. Moreover, the guilty party is a sociopath, a solution that I’ve always found too neat.

That said, I finished Company of Liars and was glad I did. Maybe you would be too.

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

Trying to Live a Moral Life: The Ten Thousand Things

16 Monday Mar 2015

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Review: The Ten Thousand Things, by John Spurling
Overlook Duckworth, 2014. 354 pp. $28

An ancient Chinese saying proposes that the universe contains ten thousand things. The narrator of this eponymous, thought-provoking novel observes that “of all the complexities of the ten thousand things, the self-consciousness of man is ten thousand times the most complex.”

Ge Zichuan Relocating, by Wang Meng (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Ge Zichuan Relocating, by Wang Meng (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

The narrator is Wang Meng, later recognized as a master painter of the final decades of the Yuan Dynasty, what Westerners would call the midfourtheenth century. Wang’s artistic gifts, however, are matched by his uncanny talent for playing a minor role in significant events, a journey that occupies this supposed memoir, written in prison during his last years. His career as artist and sometime civil servant correspond with (and take flight from) the political upheaval that brings the first Ming emperor to the throne. (The manner in which this dynastic founder seizes and employs power resembles the rise of Mao, by the way.)

The novel begins, though, with a small moment, a fruitless search for a jade ring, a coveted family heirloom. Typical of The Ten Thousand Things and its protagonist, the effort evokes deep feelings in Wang, which he examines for their justness and morality, but also in light of his love for life and beauty. Many such small moments, rendered in prose that flows like the streams and waterfalls that Wang enjoys painting, yield fascinating, knotty musings on politics, war, justice, government, friendship, sex, art–many of the ten thousand things, in other words. Often, I had to look up from the book to ponder what I’d just read, and I came away admiring how Spurling has thought deeply about life. As with this:

 

Yes, educated people are probably always on the edge of madness. Aren’t they the self-conscious element in nature turned on itself? And doesn’t that mirror reflecting the mirror begin to exclude nature and transform a man into a monster? By his intelligence and adaptability man rises above all other creatures. But take those qualities beyond a certain point and the man is no longer fit to live in any world except an artificial one of his own invention.

Most of the narrative unfolds in first person, but sometimes in third, as if the editors of his memoirs were speaking, but it could as well be Wang himself, in his self-conscious complexity. Several times, other characters accuse him of being emotionally cautious, and outwardly, he is. But inside, he’s a boiling cauldron, and his struggle to manage that and do the right thing makes him human. At the same time, he’s always trying to improve as an artist and is terrified of allowing pride, laziness, or foolishness to hamper his vision, an internal conflict that speaks to me:

 

The difficult part is to see the ten thousand things clearly without always getting caught in my own tricks for drawing them.

 

If that’s not relevant to writing, I don’t know what is.

Despite its philosophical nature, I find the narrative compelling and tense, and the pages turned quickly for me. I do think Spurling does himself or the reader no favors by occasional foreshadowings, like “he would never have believed that such-and-such could happen,” which to me only get in the way. But in any case, you have to be in the mood for a meander, not a gallop, and though the story grows, it’s not what you’d call a coherent, classic plot.

Like In the Wolf’s Mouth and The Lie, The Ten Thousand Things has been nominated for the Walter Scott Prize in historical fiction–deservedly, I think.

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

Befuddled Nobility: Plague Land

19 Thursday Feb 2015

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The death of Wat Tyler, who led a peasant revolt in 1381. Richard II is the crowned horseman addressing the crowd. (Library Royal MS 18.E.i-ii f. 175; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

The death of Wat Tyler, who led a peasant revolt in 1381. Richard II is the crowned horseman addressing the crowd. (Library Royal MS 18.E.i-ii f. 175; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Review: Plague Land, by S. D. Sykes

Pegasus, 2015. 336 pages. $26

Imagine a family in which a selectively deaf mother floats in and out of lucidity; the daughter never smiles and spends all her time listening at keyholes; and the younger son, the man of the house at age eighteen, isn’t up to the job. Sounds like today’s dysfunctional family, right?

Well, in S. D. Sykes’s hands, the year is 1350, the place is Kent, and the boy, Oswald de Lacy, is the new lord of the manor, Somershill. Oswald can’t tame his late father’s horse, doesn’t know the first thing about sheep-shearing, and has little or no authority over his tenants. That’s because he’s spent his young life at a monastery, studying Roger Bacon and Aristotle, and acquiring a taste for rational thought, atheism, and surprisingly democratic ideas.

No, Plague Land isn’t a lift from Monty Python or Blackadder. It’s a well-plotted mystery and coming-of-age story, replete with credibly rendered fourteenth-century sights, sounds, and smells. A girl has been found murdered and her body mutilated, and the peasantry, incited by a demagogue priest, are all too ready to ascribe the crime to witchcraft. Oswald, pushed to investigate by his sense of right and wrong and the wishes of his confessor and lifelong tutor, Brother Peter, sets out to investigate.

Along the way, Oswald suffers many reversals and embarrassments, not least that his belief in observation and proof sets the population against him, and that he must persuade rather than command. Though this is Sykes’s first novel, she deploys the “no–and furthermore” device with great skill, increasing the obstacles in milord’s way at every turn. Nothing comes easily, and the providential accidents that rescue sleuths in lesser novels don’t happen here. Theories about whodunit change constantly (and plausibly), and Oswald can trust nobody, not even the advice of Brother Peter, whose schemes to get his protegé out of trouble constantly backfire.

All that makes good storytelling, but maybe a little too good. As Oswald remarks, he is lord of the manor, damn it, so why don’t people obey? It’s that frustration which, at the start, made me wonder whether Sykes intended a parody after all. But she’s serious, and a historical note explains her reasoning. Atheists and rational thinkers did exist in 1350, she says, though they were obviously a tiny minority. Further, the bubonic plague of the preceding years had upset the social order so drastically that tenant farmers sometimes had room to demand certain rights.

Maybe, but Plague Land stretches these notions pretty far. I accept that the plague has killed Oswald’s father and older brothers, giving the young lord his inheritance by surprise, and depleted the ranks of peasantry and servants, putting the estate in financial jeopardy. But the extent to which Oswald lacks a grip on things or can exercise a power he doesn’t feel he owns–the coming-of-age narrative–seems, well, modern.

Plague or no, I have to think that when Lord Somershill gives an order, bumbler though he may be, the peasantry should hop to. Nor should he be able to marry a commoner, which he believes he can, a startling concept in 1850, let alone 1350. Unusually sophisticated, especially for an eighteen-year-old, he’s never so confused that he doesn’t know what his feelings are, even if they war inside him. That, like the language, strikes me as too modern.

Still, Plague Land is good fun, and I gather that Sykes plans more novels about Oswald de Lacy. I’ll be interested to see how the series develops.

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