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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.

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.

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.

Creative Destruction

05 Monday Jan 2015

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Review
Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague
Penguin, 2002. 304 pp. $16

Where, you may ask, can you find wonder in a novel about a bubonic plague epidemic that causes apocalyptic losses and prompts superstitious people to destroy each other?

Yet wonder there is, and a tiny Derbyshire village in 1666 becomes the water droplet in which a microscope reveals the world. Anna Frith, a young widow who supplements her meager living by serving the rector as housemaid, throws herself into the tasks imposed by a lethal disease that nobody understands. Apprenticing herself to the charismatic, tireless, and moody Rector Mompellion and his thoughtful wife, Elinor, Anna comforts the dying, mourns the dead, and tries to protect the survivors from each other–when she can.

Paul Fürst, engraving, c. 1721, of a plague doctor of Marseilles. His nose-case is filled with smoking material to keep off the plague.

A plague doctor, Marseilles, from an engraving by Paul Fürst, about 1721. The beak contains material thought to ward off the disease. (Courtesy Wikipedia.)

Through these thankless, seemingly pitiful efforts, Anna creates a wonder: herself. In this hottest of crucibles, she tests her abilities, courage, fears, religious beliefs, and ideas about love, tempering her character and soul. Year of Wonders is a coming-of-age story, among other things, and seldom have I read such an intelligent, unsparing, limpidly written, and satisfying one as this.

A novel with this background reminds me of Albert Camus’s philosophical masterpiece, The Plague, in which Dr. Rieux, the hero, does all he can to combat the disease, though he knows his work has no effect. Camus’s plague is an allegory for Nazism, to which the only antidote is belief in humanity, feeble though that seems. (By the way, he wrote his first draft where Village of Secrets by Caroline Moorehead takes place. See my review, “The Just and Unjust,” December 15.)

Year of Wonders is, of course, a very different book, but Anna is herself a thinker, in her feet-in-the-soil way, and that, too, underlies the title. She repeatedly asks herself whether God sent the plague, and why, a prime question of the late seventeenth century, when Europeans were beginning to embrace scientific observation, not divine writ, as the key to deciphering the natural world. Her answers to this question change over time, and, fitting her character, occur in such ordinary moments as when she stubs her toe or takes a horse out for exercise. Though Brooks never makes this explicit–properly so–Anna, the rector, and Elinor represent the cusp of a frightening yet liberating discovery, the role of random chance. How they react to their gradual, hard-won insights makes this a rich, engrossing story.

Year of Wonders is the third Geraldine Brooks novel I’ve read, and, like the other two (Caleb’s Crossing; March), she shows a sure hand with the language, ways, and social beliefs of the time. However, I prefer this novel (her first), because it feels fuller, somehow, more compact and direct, elegant in its simple framework while exploiting its angles and surfaces. I had a little trouble with the narrative, at first, trying to figure out the sequence of events, but that soon resolved. The ending, though very satisfying, may not be entirely plausible, but I like its irony, and it reinforces what Brooks is trying to say.

I heartily recommend this book, which has given me a great deal to think about, as a reader and novelist.

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