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Tag Archives: religious conflict

Heresies: The King at the Edge of the World

28 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Arthur Phillips, book review, courtier, Elisabeth I, England, heresy, historical fiction, innocence, Ottoman Empire, religious conflict, sixteenth century, violence and culture, Wars of Religion

Review: The King at the Edge of the World, by Arthur Phillips
Random House, 2020. 265 pp. $27

In 1591, Mahmoud Ezzedine lives a fulfilling life. As court physician to the Sultan Murad in Constantinople, Mahmoud is highly respected, and his general practice gives him a deserved reputation as a skilled, empathic healer. He has a comfortable house, a beautiful, loving wife, and a son whom he dotes on. Truly, Allah has blessed him.

But a diplomatic mission to London, of all places, is setting forth, and Mahmoud, who’d rather not go anywhere, is dragged along. He has little choice, really, for Murad the Great’s command is law. However, the official who gives the Caliph of Caliphs the idea to send the doctor with the diplomats lusts after Mahmoud’s wife. As a kind, honest person who prefers directness to invasion or suggestion, Mahmoud’s no match for that particular courtier, or any other, for that matter. And you just know, even if you haven’t read the jacket flap — don’t — that the good doctor will make an innocent mistake, for which he’ll pay dearly.

If you’re like me and get upset when you read about decent people suffering for their virtues while the evil triumph, The King at the Edge of the World will make you ache. For that reason, short as the novel is, and recounting as riveting a story as you could want, the threats to our hero kept me from plowing through. Do read the book, though — but not, repeat, the jacket flap, about as potent a spoiler as you’ll ever find.

Sultan Murad III (d. 1595) by an unknown Spanish artist (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain). As his first act upon accession to the throne, Murad had his five younger brothers strangled.

Phillips excels at re-creating historical attitudes, prejudices, and ways of reasoning. Mahmoud’s adventures in England also resemble a thriller’s in their ever-increasing intensity; combined, these elements make a strong, thought-provoking narrative. At its center, Phillips puts the England riven by conflict between Protestant and Catholic and imagines how a Muslim would view that. It will be recalled that Elizabethan politics and diplomacy revolved around who prayed where, and in what way, and how many people died, often in hideous fashion, for doing it wrong or attempting to make everyone else do it their way. Hard to imagine that all this idiocy happened during an age blessed with cultural triumph — and Mahmoud, the observant Muslim, remains unimpressed:

He was there, he reminded himself, to be a figure of strength and confidence in the face of endless strangeness, of threats to health and mental stamina. He must fortify the bodies of the embassy’s men (himself included) and fortify their minds against all that was wrong here: the half-naked women, the food, the fog, the filth, the intoxicating drink, the intellectual softness, the islanders’ several varieties of devoted and violent false faith.

The physician, if he weren’t a member of a diplomatic mission, would be called a heretic and a savage to his face (as some English folk manage to imply even as they think they’re being polite). But who’s the person who embodies religious virtue, and who are the real heretics? Who’s the savage, and who’s the civilized, cultured man? This is how Phillips casts the sceptered isle in its glory. To be sure, he also creates an English narrator who insists that Catholic plots against the realm do exist and, if not crushed, would cause widespread bloodshed. Since he’s utterly credible, the question then becomes how to square the civilization and the savagery; and of course, there is no real answer.

My only objections to this novel — have I mentioned the too-revealing jacket flap? — concern Mahmoud’s role as a political actor. How could such a guileless innocent occupy any court position, let alone that of a physician, with the power to kill as well as heal? After all, history records how Ottoman crown princes, on attaining the throne, might have their brothers strangled with a silken cord, as Murad did. Only the politically adept would survive such an atmosphere, or even be invited into it.

Similarly, as the narrative progresses, Mahmoud learns a thing or two about survival — not easily, mind you, and requiring excruciating mental gymnastics, which Phillips ably portrays. For that reason I don’t entirely accept the end, which the author fudges somewhat, unwelcome in itself.

Nevertheless, I invite you to read The King at the Edge of the World and be amazed at Mahmoud’s ingenuity — and his creator’s.

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

Blame the Woman: No Small Shame

17 Monday Aug 2020

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1914, Australia, book review, Catholicism, Christine Bell, emigration, First World War, historical fiction, home-front sufferings, inner journey, masochistic heroine, predictable narrative, religious conflict, romance, sexism, shame, WWI fiction with female protagonist

Review: No Small Shame, by Christine Bell
Impact, 2020. 396 pp. AU $33

When fifteen-year-old Mary O’Donnell emigrates from Scotland to Australia in 1914, besides the promise of a more prosperous life, she’s hoping to taste a thin wedge of freedom, like a good pie — and to be reunited with her childhood crush, Liam Merrilees. But there’s precious little money waiting in this sparse landscape for Mary or her family, Further, Liam has lost the fire in his eyes, though not his self-involvement. When he’s not being outright brutal toward Mary, he shows absolutely no interest in her, but she’s the only one who can’t see it. She’s used to being kicked. Mary’s mother has bruised her all her life, and not just emotionally; daughter accepts this as her lot.

From this premise, you can predict where the narrative will go most of the time. You know that Mary won’t give up on Liam, that mother will never stop ripping into her, and that vile prophecies will bear fruit, evoking more than one trope. Yet the novel works, more or less, because Mary struggles to slip between the Catholic hellfire her mother has taught her to fear and the life she’s dreamed of leading. Her awakening from masochism won’t happen overnight, nor will the world spin any differently for it, but Mary’s interior journey is far less ordained than her exterior one.

The background fits too. First World War Australia, though distant from both Gallipoli and the Western Front, where its volunteers have gone, has its own battlegrounds, starting with that word volunteer. The country has no conscription, but the number of white feathers handed out to able-bodied men not in uniform, based on the grotesque assumption that real men never shirk a fight, takes a heavy emotional toll, on Liam as on others. The lengthy casualty lists don’t seem to make a dent, either; if some men have been slaughtered, it’s up to the rest to avenge them, even if nobody really knows concretely what the war’s about. Throw in wartime price inflation, the wages that haven’t kept pace, and strife between Catholic and Protestant, you’ve got quite a vortex of problems. Incidentally, Mary’s mother relishes the religious conflict, in her perverse way. She’s a piece of work.

I like this aspect of No Small Shame, the everyday burdens that twist life in ways that no one could have imagined when the trumpets sounded. Not least are the burdens that women bear, silently and without question, for it’s their job to make sure their men are happy and feel supported, no matter what sacrifice that entails. And you guessed it: Mary takes the brunt, though she’s not alone.

Bell’s prose is simple yet effective, as with Mary’s first glimpse of her new home:

Where were the fabulous fields and plump livestock waiting for lads and farmers promised by the immigration agent in Motherwell offering assisted passages to sunny Australia? All Mary could see extending beyond the train windows was blade after blade of grass bleached colourless as sand in a desert. The poor animals in the endless paddocks were without a leaf of shade or drip of water. She couldn’t guess how any of them survived.

Less convincing, I find, are the characterizations. Maw, her mother, is well drawn. As for Mary, it’s not easy to portray a slow transformation to selfhood, and Bell succeeds, mostly, barring shaky instances that don’t quite make sense to me. Liam, though predictable, has edges. He’s never learned to move past self-pity or reckon with who he is, and though he wants to do better, he can’t. Unfortunately, the reader knows what Mary doesn’t, that he’ll never change. I wish Bell hadn’t tried to redeem him, which I don’t believe, and which I think actually demeans his stature, renders him less tragic.

The children in these pages are idealized, not like any I’ve ever met. Ditto Tom, a Protestant friend of Mary’s who holds a candle for her, which she’s remarkably slow to recognize. He’s a nice guy and treats her kindly, but he’s cardboard, and since he’s crucial to the story, his opacity hurts the narrative. As a man with a medical condition that prevents him from enlisting, he embodies the shame men feel, just as Mary represents women that way. That’s not enough.

Nevertheless, despite these objections, I should point out how unusual No Small Shame is among First World War novels with a female protagonist, a narrow field to begin with. Mary’s neither nurse nor bandage roller nor factory worker nor her country’s soul, keeping the home fires burning. I like that. For that reason, you may find this novel worth reading.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the author through my work for Historical Novels Review, in which this post appeared in shorter, different form.

The Hard in Hardscrabble: Island of Wings

03 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1830s, characterization, cultural clash, description, historical fiction, Karin Altenberg, nineteenth century, poverty, proselytizing, religious conflict, St. Kilda

Review: Island of Wings, by Karin Altenberg
Penguin, 2011. 311 pp. $15

In July 1830, Neil MacKenzie, a handsome, young Glaswegian minister, takes up a post on a remote island in the Hebrides, joined by his new bride, Lizzie. St. Kilda, also known as Hirta, is a harshly beautiful place. The islanders live in ancient hovels knee-deep in filth, and they subsist on sea birds such as puffins and gannets, and what poor crops they can coax out of the thin soil.

St. Kilda, Outer Hebrides (Public domain; courtesy urbanghostmedia.com).

St. Kilda, Outer Hebrides (Public domain; courtesy urbanghostmedia.com).

But it’s not the poverty that draws Neil MacKenzie, though he believes that his calling lies among the humble. It’s that the St. Kildans, having lived with pagan lore for centuries, and (as he and his church preceptors believe), knowing nothing of Christian civilization, they offer the test he’s been seeking. Can he, through faith, force of character, and energy, lead them onto the true path? As a consequence, a zealous vision of grandeur takes hold of him. He’s quick to put himself and his task in the center of everything that happens, a further reflection of his test. And therein lies the tension, because despite his herculean efforts, he can’t pull everyone along with him, least of all his long-suffering wife.

Lizzie, though isolated by shyness and a language barrier–unlike Neil, she doesn’t speak Gaelic, the only tongue the islanders understand–gradually learns more about the St. Kildans than he does. These people are poor and illiterate, but they’ve developed a social organization that makes decisions through consensus and strives to reduce conflicts over envy and greed (so much so that mainland dilettantes condescend to visit and pronounce the St. Kildans noble savages). Lizzie doesn’t go so far as to assume that the islanders are civilized, but she does recognize that her husband is trying to alter a way of life of which he knows nothing except his own contempt for it. Further, she realizes that telling people the Lord will provide may sound empty, when they helplessly watch their infants die of a horrible, wracking illness, and where hunger is common at least half the year.

The best part of Island of Wings is the setting, rendered in simple, compelling prose:


Winter followed autumn almost unnoticed, in the same way that dusk was merely a darkening of each bloomy day. The island was thus empty of life, and the fierce Atlantic gales that swept across the crags and glens week after week, month after month, increased the isolation of the couple in the manse. When their need for closeness and their longing to be loved was too great they would sneak around each other like cats around a plate of hot milk snatching at tenderness.


The struggles between islanders and the elements, preacher and flock, and Neil and Lizzie, make for an interesting story. But interesting is a tame word, and what keeps Island of Wings earthbound for me is the clumsy characterization. Altenberg, though she employs an eye for detail and moment-to-moment emotional transitions, never unleashes them from her tight grasp. Rather than show them, she lists them: “As he continued to look out to sea he was aware that her gentle devotion threatened to embrace him. Despising himself, he felt a need to deflect his sense of failure and shield himself from her love. At that moment he resented her decency as much as his own weakness.”

Three sentences describe a man’s greatest character flaw, the inability to admit vulnerability. I understand this type of character too well–I grew up with people like that–so I empathize with Lizzie and how she suffers, which is why I didn’t put the book aside. The themes Altenberg has chosen, of isolation, cultural clash, and social blindness, strike a chord with me as well. Nevertheless, Island of Wings could have been a very good novel, not just an “interesting story,” and I hope that in her next effort, Altenberg puts it all together.

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

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