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A Not-Quite-Faustian Bargain: The Outcasts of Time

07 Monday Mar 2022

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Review: The Outcasts of Time, by Ian Mortimer
Pegasus, 2018. 386 pp. $26

Devon, 1348. Two brothers, John and William, walk through a plague-ridden country, past rotting corpses and scenes of destruction that presage the Apocalypse. When the sickness overtakes them too, they realize that their lives are forfeit, and they fear that their souls may not be ready for death. However, as they sense their strength wane, a disembodied voice tells them they have six days to live and offers them a choice.

They may struggle home with their remaining strength to see what has happened to their town and loved ones. Or they may spend the six days in time travel, as each day will advance another ninety-nine years, during which brief moment they may redeem themselves. After arguing whether they have listened to the Devil and are being led astray, John and William accept the offer. It’s a twist on Faust, without a contract or sale of a soul.

Harry Clarke’s illustration for the Bayard Taylor translation of Goethe’s Faust, 1870-71 (courtesy Project Gutenberg Open Library System, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

I seldom, as in never, review historical fantasy and rarely read any. But The Outcasts of Time caught my fancy, and maybe it’ll catch yours. As a literary conceit, time travel has grown a long, white beard by now, but I like it that Mortimer has cast his century-spanning mechanism as a matter of conscience rather than a gizmo. Also, no abracadabra changes the scenery or chases away evil people, of whom there are plenty, for our travelers often land hard as the centuries pass.

The year 1447 seems miserable; 1546 brings the brothers to Henry VIII’s time; 1645 places them smack in the Civil War. Consequently, they must choose a face to present without knowing what’s prudent, because so much has changed. What was counted sinful in 1348 may now be virtuous, and what passed for virtue may now be treason. They have a lot of explaining to do.

That’s partly the point, for The Outcasts of Time has much to say about good, evil, and how material wealth or the progress of learning affect them or are used or misused. The novel also explores the human desire for permanence, proof of our passage on this planet that someone else will find after our deaths. John, a stonemason who worked on the Exeter Cathedral and created sculptures he’s proud of, is conscious of this desire in himself and of how futile it is. As he observes more than halfway through his time journey:

It is a salutary thought that something as insubstantial as a name can endure so long.… Tradition, like a centuries-old creeper of ivy, slowly winds its way into the crevices of our conversations and fastens itself onto such words, holding them firmly in place. You’d have thought that it was the private property, kept away from prying eyes and jealous fingers, which would endure. But all the houses from my time have been replaced. As for possessions, fires consume them, thieves steal them, and time erodes them. Common things, like names and roads, last for centuries.

John’s quest to perform a good deed to redeem himself before death takes various turns. That poses several questions, not least whether goodness can be conscious, or whether such acts can serve a redemptive purpose.

Among other pleasures, The Outcasts of Time offers historical detail in a light but authoritative hand. You see through John’s eyes what has changed, what would strike him most strongly, and why, which makes you think. For obvious reasons, Mortimer has updated the brothers’ language, or nobody in later centuries would have understood them. Yet he’s hewed to simplicity of tongue, for the most part, and seldom does the language jump out and stop the reader.

I do wonder, though, how John, who is excellent at ciphering but illiterate, and his brother, who can read, a little — how that happens, I don’t know — dispute the way they do. Free of superstition, seemingly also of common prejudices, they sound sophisticated. They lack any notion that the world is, and has always been, what they know, and appear ready to step outside it enough to judge the future centuries shown them. They sound like relativists ahead of their time, perhaps too tolerant of what they find.

William, the sensualist of the two, comes across less clearly or deeply than John, and though he’s supposed to represent a person who chooses pleasures over an examined life, I still want to see his dreams and desires beyond the next cup of ale or the next woman. Further, though the brothers remark bitterly on the priests’ flight from their plague-ridden land of 1348, they don’t seem perturbed at the likelihood that they’ll die unshriven, their sins unconfessed. I would have expected terror at the prospect.

However, the narrative and the philosophy within it demand a stretch from the characters, and if plausibility suffers to a mild degree, remember that we’re talking about a story with Faustian overtones, a legend to begin with. The Outcast of Time’s an engrossing novel, worth stretching for.

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

Blood Will Have Blood: The Abstainer

22 Monday Mar 2021

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Review: The Abstainer, by Ian McGuire
Random House, 2020. 307 pp. $27

When the law hangs three members of the Fenian Brotherhood for killing a policeman in Manchester, England, in 1867, Constable James O’Connor knows the punishment will solve nothing. The Irish revolutionaries will retaliate, and since he’s the copper who has paid informants among them and understands his countrymen better than his English superiors, officialdom should listen. But they don’t. O’Connor’s place of birth condemns him in their eyes; they consider the Irish bloodthirsty, drunken savages, thieves, and heathens. Besides, O’Connor left the Dublin police under circumstances he won’t talk about, but which have something to do with drink.

Now, however, he abstains, and though his sympathetic, more human approach to law enforcement alternately puzzles and enrages his bosses, he speaks the sober truth no one wants to hear. But he does get them to pay attention when he learns that the New York Fenians have sent an assassin to Manchester to plot revenge for the hangings. Unfortunately, it will take more than O’Connor’s say-so to persuade his superiors to follow through in the ways he suggests, partly because they can’t believe that the drastic legal penalties they have just meted out will fail to curb the violence.

O’Connor has an inkling of what he’s up against, but not even he can anticipate the determination of his newest enemy. Stephen Doyle, though born in Ireland, fought for the Union in the Civil War, and he believes that he’s been sent to Manchester to fight another war whose rules are much the same. A colder, more ruthless and capable opponent would be hard to find, and he startles even his Fenian brethren in Manchester by his attitude. You know that he will give no quarter and expect none.

You also know that sooner or later, O’Connor and Doyle will meet, because the constable does his best to think along with the assassin. However, O’Connor has two distinct disadvantages. He can’t command, merely suggest, whereas Doyle dictates what he wants, and the Fenian foot soldiers obey. Secondly, and more important, O’Connor has a heart, and it’s still reeling from the untimely death of his beloved wife in Dublin. Further, a nephew he barely knows shows up from America and demands to play a role in the surveillance operation — a brilliant stroke of McGuire’s that raises the stakes immediately.

Consequently, this thriller has much more to it than the usual cat and mouse. You do want to know whether O’Connor and the police will thwart Doyle or fail to stop him, though it would be fairer to say that the narrative gives you no choice, compelling you to turn the pages. McGuire’s a terrific storyteller, and “no — and furthermore” lives in the very soot-infested air of Manchester. For me, the tension even feels too much, at times.

“Freedom to Ireland,” an 1866 Currier & Ives lithograph. The Fenian Brotherhood began in the United States and was eventually superseded by similar organizations (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the U.S.)

On top of that, The Abstainer explores an aspect of good versus evil that belongs to every conflict in which some believe that violence is the best or only solution, while others don’t. Naturally, that division fits Irish history under British rule, so though this story takes place in 1867, the same issues would apply in 1967 or beyond. Accordingly, McGuire’s really asking who has the upper hand: the side with fewer scruples or the one claiming the moral high ground? And is the upper hand the better hand to have, or not?

As befits this heady theme, McGuire deploys lucid, hard-edged prose that conveys deep feeling and the raw atmosphere. Early on in the novel, O’Connor witnesses the hanging — he’d rather not, but he’s supposed to be there — and it makes a terrible impression on him:

O’Connor hears the call of a crow like a dry cork being pulled from a bottle and, from over the river, a clatter of cartwheels and the whinny of a horse. For a long moment, the three men stand side by side beneath the heavy oak crossbeam, separate but conjoined, like rough-hewn caryatids, and then with a startling suddenness they are gone. Instead of their breathing, living bodies, there are only the three taught lines of rope like long vertical scratches on the prison wall. The crowd inhales, then gives a long guttural sigh like a wave slowly pulling back from a beach. O’Connor shudders, swallows, feels a pulse of nausea sweep up from his stomach into his mouth.

With this moment and many others, throughout The Abstainer, you see how thin the line between life and death, good fortune and bad. One false move here, and catastrophe would have resulted; one forgetful lapse there, and it arrives unexpectedly. That’s another theme, what happiness depends on, and how fleeting it can be.

If this story sounds bleak, in many ways, it is. But it’s also quite powerful and rings true; this is a novel to remember, and I highly recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, an online retailer that splits its proceeds with independent bookstores.

What Freedom Is: Washington Black

01 Monday Mar 2021

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Review: Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan
Random House/Vintage, 2019. 384 pp. $17

There may be more brutal, unfeeling masters than Erasmus Wilde, owner of Faith sugar plantation in Barbados in 1830, but it’s hard to imagine. For instance, when a slave commits suicide, an overseer decapitates his corpse. Why? The slaves believe that once they die, they’ll be reunited with their people in Africa. So Wilde tells them that headless corpses wander for eternity; beware, there’s no escape. If you kill yourself, you’re a thief, stealing his property.

Such crushing logic, which warps every conceivable interaction, cows nearly all the slaves into hopeless submission; most do all they can to remain inconspicuous. Consequently, when Wilde’s brother Christopher comes to stay, eleven-year-old George Washington Black (known as Wash) is terrified to discover that he’s been chosen the newcomer’s manservant.

To his amazement, however, Christopher — who insists on being called Titch — is cut from a very different cloth, as Wash quickly learns whenever he must go to the big house and wait table. Titch has no interest in slavery, except to abolish it; and Faith’s chief attractions for him are the flora and fauna and a steep hill from which he hopes to launch a balloon for exploration.

Bridgetown, Barbados, in 1848, fourteen years after Britain outlawed slavery throughout the empire (from Robert H. Schombergk, The History of Barbados; courtesy British Library via Wikimedia Commons)

But a suspicious death forces the two to flee — and from that moment, Wash begins to imagine the life he could never have dreamed of. Whether he gets it or not, and how he reinvents himself in the process, makes as compelling a novel as you will find. Washington Black will captivate you and make you think.

Edugyan examines, from the inside, what it means to be a slave, to have no will of your own save what little is granted, and which may be taken away at any time. That sounds obvious, but I assure you, in its moment-to-moment portrayal here, that simply stated condition has deep, insidious effects that wrap around the characters like the roots of an evil, destructive plant.

Titch may dislike slavery, yet Wash wonders what, exactly, he means to his new boss. Is Wash a real person or merely the perfect size and shape ballast for the balloon? Is his a young mind Titch respects, or does the scientist teach him what he needs to become a better assistant? As with all the characters, and I do mean all, the author depicts this pair in their fullness, so that you know their internal struggles. Even Erasmus Wilde, a truly despicable man, has his angles and quirks; no cardboard villain, he. In that way, he receives his due, even as the perpetrator of great evil.

To write a good novel about a victim is harder than it looks. (Writing any good novel is harder than it looks, but that’s another story.) Self-pity would undermine the narrative and warp the reader’s connection to Wash, while earnestness, the flip side of that coin, would demean this tale. Not here. Wash hates his enemies with a razor fierceness, no righteousness, bravado, or breast-beating allowed, just earned hostility. Whatever self-pity creeps in momentarily overtakes him in a different context — love, which is only natural and quite real. Everyone in love acts entitled once in a while, at least.

Also important, Wash never stops striving and loving, no matter what blows he takes. Suffering by itself holds only a tenuous connection for readers; but caring for someone else despite suffering always wins. If Wash becomes remarkably adept at certain pursuits, perhaps stretching credulity, his path remains difficult, often perilous, his adventures allowing for (if not demanding) a character somewhat larger than life.

Throughout, he’s a spectacular observer, the prose being another pleasure of the book, as with his first look at Bridge Town, the capital of Barbados:

Swells of dust boiled up off the roads. Horses trotted past, heads low in the heat, flies swarming. We clattered past a sailor on a street corner blowing through some bizarre knot of pipes, while beside him a second danced along to his own fiddle, his fingers flying like shadows over the strings. We stopped in the sudden traffic; through the carriage oozed the stink of overripe fruit carted in from the port, and of immense slabs of tuna starting to turn in the heat. At a passing market stall I glimpsed their fishy eyes, fissured with blood as they gawked on beds of cool leaves.

Sometimes, in the early going when Wash is still a young boy, the voice slips — the narrative makes observations seemingly too knowledgeable for a lad, even one looking back from later years. But that’s a minor blemish on a superb novel, and I highly recommend Washington Black.

Disclaimer: I bought my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, an online retailer that shares its receipts with independent bookstores.

Remembering Barry Unsworth: Sacred Hunger

06 Monday Jun 2016

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Review: Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth
Norton, 1993. 630 pp. $16

Four years ago almost to the day, Barry Unsworth died, my favorite contemporary author. The New York Times obituary called him “one of the foremost historical novelists in English,” an ungenerous epitaph if ever I’ve heard one. Like any literary master, Unsworth told powerful stories that expressed timeless themes through the actions of characters whom you’d swear lived and breathed. To qualify or diminish his accomplishment simply because history pricked his imagination more than present-day life is to miss the point of literature.

I’ve just finished Sacred Hunger, the sixth Unsworth novel I’ve read, and it’s sublime. The title refers to the urge to profit no matter what morality, decency, or human sympathy might dictate. The chief business here is the mideighteenth-century English slave trade, so the moral divide is very stark, but Unsworth takes that further. Not only does he replicate forms of slavery among people who have no direct connection to the trade, he shows how men and women can enslave themselves to ideas that cause them to inflict suffering on others. This is brilliant, and what’s more, it’s subtle–you see it without Unsworth having to tell you. It’s also unbearably tense, because every human transaction in Sacred Hunger carries tremendous risks, and for every mistake, someone will pay.

Punishment aboard a slave ship, 1792 (Courtesy Library of Congress via history.ac.uk)

Punishment aboard a slave ship, 1792 (Courtesy Library of Congress via history.ac.uk)

Any novel exploring the nature of evil must have a compelling, fully realized villain, and Sacred Hunger has two. Saul Thurso, captain of the newly launched slave ship Liverpool Merchant, lets nothing and no one touch him. Even to look him in the eyes is an affront, which he suffers only from his employers or social betters. He tolerates no attempt to establish rapport, for in his view, there are only masters and servants, the one controlling the other through terror. If the underling objects, it’s only to grab what rightfully belongs to the master. So when Thurso whips a crew man senseless, he believes he’s acting to protect his employer’s profit and, therefore, his own.

Erasmus Kemp, son of the Liverpool Merchant’s owner, shares one trait of Thurso’s, the inability to befriend anyone. However, Kemp craves that more than anything; he just goes to great lengths to deny it, burying it under his tremendous drive to make himself rich and successful. He can banter with other men and be genial when he thinks there’s money to be made, but in pursuit of love, he’s too raw to admit what he wants. Early in the novel, he courts a young woman as if she were a valuable commodity, albeit one who fires his passion. Impressed with his ardor, she takes him seriously enough to see through him and attempt to soothe his ill nature, if he could tolerate that. But there’s the rub:

Love had not so far made him happy. His intention, the fixing of his will on the girl, he experienced as an affliction. His whole being seemed tender, painful to the slightest touch–even at times, the touch of air itself. The impressions of his senses came as blows to his heart, strangely similar to those of loss or violation.

Like Thurso, then, Kemp’s a prisoner of his own false dignity. Both act despicably, though I understand why, not to excuse them, but to recognize them as real.

Enter Matthew Paris, Kemp’s cousin. Kemp despises him, first, because he’s served a prison sentence, and, second, because Paris dares to hold his head up. But Kemp, Sr., takes pity on his nephew and allows him a berth on the Liverpool Merchant as a doctor. Since Paris’s crime was distributing pamphlets questioning the Creation, he’s a free thinker and loud about it, so you know he’ll run afoul of Thurso. Sure enough, he tries to tell the captain that when a slave refuses to eat, it’s because he’s humiliated and melancholy, not, as Thurso would have it, to deny his captors their profit. You can guess how that exchange goes.

You might also guess that, with the tensions between captain and crew, captain and officers, and the entire ship’s company versus their human cargo, this voyage will end differently from the way Kemp and Thurso have planned. But just how differently, and how that unfolds, I leave for you to discover.

I’m so sorry that Barry Unsworth left us.

Disclaimer: I pulled this book off my shelf, where it had remained, unread, for an unconscionably long time.

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.