With an ambitious cast of characters and an epic plot that sweeps from Constantinople to Venice and Rome, from Sicily to Outremer, The Sheen On The Silk by Anne Perry chronicles the struggle for the soul of a nation. More than the tale of any one character, The Sheen On The Silk is a loving, if melancholy, tribute to the capital of the now vanished “Byzantine” empire. As such, it is historical fiction that asks to be savoured slowly and thoughtfully.
1273. In the guise of a eunuch, physician Anna Lascaris arrives from Nicaea to Constantinople to set up a medical practice. A female physician would not be allowed to treat men, and Anna must to gain entry to Constantinople’s elite in order to investigate the mystery behind her brother’s implication in the murder of a powerful nobleman.
It soon becomes clear that the fate of her brother is bound up in a much larger affair: the battle for the very survival of the empire. At home and abroad, any and all means are used to win control over the nation and its Church, which refuses to bow to Rome. It is only a matter of time before Anna herself is dragged into a whirlpool of intrigue and forced to engage in a game of wits to remain alive.
At a time when nobody is allowed to remain neutral, and to speak one wrong word can lead to death, how far will people go to defend their loyalties and fulfill their ambitions? Is there any place for friendship? And what about love, when your identity is a lie?
Although The Sheen On The Silk opens a decade after Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus (Palaiologos) has recaptured the empire from its Latin occupiers, the seeds of its plot are found in the Fourth Crusade’s devastating sack of the capital in 1204. Enough is explained about that traumatic event to illuminate its significance, but since Perry does not dwell on the larger historical context of the conflict between the empire and the West, the reason for some of the tensions can seem obscure. Because my memory was hazy and I enjoy reading about mediaeval history, I looked through some books. Here is a brief summary.
“Byzantine empire” is a modern term which was not used by the mediaeval world. The people of that geographical area called themselves Romans and their nation the Empire Of The Romans or Rhomania (not to be confused with modern-day Romania). In the fourth century, the capital of the old Roman empire had moved from Rome to Constantinople, and while government of the empire was divided into separate administrative territories these continued to be viewed by all as forming one realm. But in 800, Charlemagne’s decision to seize authority and crown himself emperor in Rome shattered Constantinople’s hold on the western half of the empire. The eastern half (which today is labelled the Byzantine empire), condemned the act and held to the position that it represented the only true and legitimate Roman state. The western half, on its part, set into motion a polemical tradition of denying the eastern territories any right to a Roman identity. Then, in 1054, the Great Schism between the Church in Rome and the Church in Constantinople exploded, formally splitting Christianity into Catholicism and Orthodoxy. This rupture compounded the alienation between the eastern and western empires.
As a result, misleading labels such as “the mediaeval Greek empire” were coined in the west about the eastern empire, as well as the infamous word “Byzantine”, a 16th century invention still used as a synonym for depravity and corruption. That is the inherited term many western academic historians still perpetuate. Perry’s use of the anachronism can therefore be interpreted as a necessary concession in order to avoid confusing the average western reader.
But if “Byzantine” Studies seem to have a long way to go to obtain objectivity, Perry does her best to redress another wrong. The Sheen On The Silk turns the commonly adopted, Latin-centric perspective 180 degrees around. Somehow it is often overlooked that the eastern Roman empire actually flourished for a thousand years, growing into the greatest centre of civilisation in mediaeval Europe. That era came to an end in 1204, the year in which the western-led Crusaders turned an expedition to reconquer Jerusalem/Outremer from the Muslims into an act of war against Constantinople. To properly understand the characters and events in The Sheen On The Silk they must be viewed in the light of the cosmopolitan splendour that came before 1204 and was irretrievably taken from the empire through that defining and devastating moment in history.
So, it is against this background of religious disunity and political enmity between the eastern Roman empire and the Latin west that Anne Perry opens her novel. The story spans a decade, ending with the aftermath of the Sicilian Vespers in 1282. The timeline (and page count!) provides opportunity for in-depth explorations of what it meant to be “Byzantine” as well as how the empire’s foreign enemies and rivals tried to manipulate the nation’s struggle to re-establish itself. In what I presume to be a departure for the author, the novel’s inciting murder mystery never assumes the central role in the story. Instead it becomes a useful tool for investigating a much larger topic: the religious schism between eastern and western Christianity and how it shaped the fate of mediaeval Europe.
This may be a good place to comment that the introspective quality and spiritual tone of The Sheen On The Silk may mark it as too philosophical a novel to fit easily with mainstream ideas about historical fiction. Anyone expecting an action-filled mediaeval thriller or a The Name Of The Rose-type historical murder mystery will have their hopes dashed. The excitement is of a slow-burning type, with subtle highs and lows that gradually build in emotional intensity.
The multifarious plotlines are drawn together in the character of Anna Lascaris, a first-rate physician and compassionate human being. As Anastasius Zarides she searches for proof of her brother’s innocence in the murder of Bessarion Comnenos. Justinian has been exiled to a monastery in the Sinai desert and only an imperial intervention can free him. Anna has no chance of communicating with him, but based on what she knows about his character she cannot believe him guilty. In the past, he selflessly claimed the blame for a tragedy that was Anna’s fault, and as a result was forced to leave the field of medicine and move to the capital. The only way Anna can ever repay her debt of gratitude is to clear him now. Unearthing the truth and putting clues together proves a formidable task, however. In Constantinople, secrets are both coin and necessity.
Anna works hard on honing her believability as a eunuch. Not only is the disguise necessary to allow her to deal with male patients, but she knows that her past injury has made her unable to bear children, which makes her unmarriageable. Since she considers the injury was partially her own, deliberate doing, giving up her female life is, for her, a type of penance. As a physician who is a eunuch, she not only benefits from relative invisibility and the confidentiality bestowed in healers, but wins respect for her moral and intellectual vigour which men would ignore in a woman. As her stay extends she becomes deeply involved with the welfare of the city, so that while she never forgets why she is there, she begins to accept the necessity of living for something more than an obsession. Each day brings with it a terrible risk, however: discovery of her deception would never be allowed to go unpunished. Eventually her fears come true, and a few people do begin to see through her disguise, another eunuch among them. There are those who would exploit her secret for their their own ends, and thus the possibility of blackmail enters the picture.
I found Anna a thoroughly sympathetic character and grew to care very much about her happiness. She never allows insults or harm done against herself to interfere with her earnest care for a patient’s welfare. When she discovers evil and wrongdoing in a person she may have admired, she allows herself to mourn the good that has been lost while at the same time refusing to be blind to the person’s faults. Others quickly discover her capacity for forgiveness and compassion, and some, to their detriment, mistake it for weakness.
Someone who does not make that mistake is Venetian captain Giuliano Dandolo. An emissary from the Doge, Giuliano Dandolo is a descendant of the rapacious Enrico Dandolo who led the Crusader pillage of Constantinople. It earns him automatic hatred in the city. Few know that Giuliano’s mother was Byzantine and is the reason for his dislike and distrust of her nation. Constantinople shakes Giuliano: it forces him to confront his core beliefs affects and changes his future. His reflections about foreignness reveal much about his character (p. 160): “Being a stranger in Constantinople gave Giuliano a freedom to grow, to change if he wished to, to embrace new ideas, no matter how wild or foolish. Belonging was safety, but it was also constriction. Not belonging was boundless, as if his feet knew no weight and his horizons were endless. But he had no roots, either, and at unexpected moments there was a loneliness that was almost unbearable.”
What complicates matters for Giuliano is partially that his character is surprisingly credulous. Although already tricked by somebody once, he later proceeds to swallow information from that person without hesitation or questions. But there is a tenderness about him that draws Anna’s attention and which warmed me, too. Like Anna, he is a wonderfully decent human being. When gradually a relationship of love germinates between them, it is tentative, more a whisper of a hint of feelings to come. For the longest time it develops more like a mutual seeking, a surprised recognition of like-minded spirits. Giuliano barely dares contemplate his reactions: he is torn between the friendship he has found with Anastasius and the impulse to flee in order to avoid having to acknowledge any kind of non-platonic love for him. I found Perry’s sensitive handling of a fragile and complicated acquaintanceship which develops into trusting yet fraught friendship to be one of the unexpected gems in the story.
A story of this scope tends to have its share of bumps and hiccups, and The Sheen On The Silk is no exception. A few times I had the impression the author forgot about a thread. For example, during a rash of violence against monks and priests who oppose the Emperor’s stance regarding Rome, Anna, who has been helping bishop Constantine in his work among the poor, is also targeted. While she manages to escape in the nick of time, no further reference is made to the incident. The perpetrators know where she lives, yet she is never shown to be nervous or even think about the possibility that they might return; it is as if the matter never took place.
Secondly, among anachronisms that cannot be attributed to academic or political tradition is the startling inclusion of Lourdes among places of pilgrimage listed by a traveller in Outremer, and the wearing of doublets, an article of clothing properly belonging to later centuries. To me, uneducated about mediaeval Orthodoxy, some of the theological debates and in particular Anna’s conclusions have a rather modern ring. For example, does the emphasis about the difference between adherence to institutionalized religion and an individual’s acceptance that the journey to God must ultimately be an intensely personal one fit in with Orthodox doctrine or even general mediaeval thought (Catharism and other heretic sects excluded)? What Perry does convey well, I thought, is how Church and State were not separate entities in the empire but were seen as two halves of a whole, with the clergy and the Emperor autonomous yet working closely together. Their common goal, shown by Perry also in the alliance between medicine and theology, was to create a mirror on earth of the Heavenly Kingdom.
On the whole, The Sheen On The Silk has a sumptuous period feel, particularly in the layering of colours, smells, and textures in descriptions of life in the streets and the homes of Constantinople (more so in the first than in the second half of the book), and in intriguing details of Anna’s medical practice. Perry memorably imbues every step in the city with a foreboding sense of the past overhanging the present: the scars left by the sack of 1204 linger like a charred patina on Constantinople’s economy as well as its architecture. Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus (whose ruthlessness I did not get a sense of in the novel, by the way), has recaptured the empire’s territories from the western invaders, yet beneath this triumph and relief Constantinople remains a ghost of its former glory, its population painfully reduced, its finances drained. Western, northern, and eastern powers are encroaching on the fragile empire’s borders. Toward the end of The Sheen On The Silk, Michael is shown aged, worn, and despairing. The last remaining hope of a nation brought to its knees rests, Constantinople believes, on whether the strength of its citizens’ faith will incline God to grant them a miracle.
Faith and obsession are twin themes in The Sheen On The Silk. How far are the characters willing to go to defend their convictions? What happens to a person when obsession causes him or her to adopt methods that represent the opposite of what the person aims to protect? Most of the protagonists wrestle in their own way with these issues, including Anna, who in the course of her quest to clear her brother experiences things that challenge her perceptions of truth, and Palombara, the Papal legate whose mission to persuade Constantinople to reunite with the Church in Rome has unexpected consequences for his ambitions. But it is in the characters of aging noblewoman Zoe Chrysaphes and Bishop Constantine that the subject is most strikingly exemplified.
Zoe Chrysaphes lives for revenge. As a child, she saw her mother raped and murdered by Crusaders, and at the beginning of the novel she is finally in a position to avenge her mother and save her city from a second Latin invasion. On one hand, Zoe embodies every negative trait associated with “Byzantine”: she is cunning, scheming, treacherous, poisonous, manipulative, unscrupulous in the extreme. On the other, she is deeply religious and perhaps the staunchest and certainly most passionate defender of the empire’s sovereignty. As one of the principal protagonists, her mark is felt everywhere in the story, and her impact on other characters and on events cannot be overestimated.
Anna, whose medical practice receives a much needed boost from Zoe's patronage, distrusts Zoe yet admires the passionate strength of her character. Similar admiration and personal reasons for gratitude draw Anna to Bishop Constantine. In his zeal to keep Orthodoxy free of Latin taint, Constantine’s passion equals Zoe’s, and his untiring work among the poor earns Anna’s respect and co-operation. But is obsession in the service of the Church automatically a virtue?
One of the many things that fascinated me about The Sheen On The Silk was how the characters grow and evolve with their experiences and the events of time. For some, their frailties eventually seal their fate, whereas others develop qualities that inspire them to reach beyond what anyone ever expected of them. While I did not like all protagonists, Perry did an excellent job in helping me understand them; moreover, I did not deem a single character dull or interchangeable with someone else– and yet the cast is massive.
More than once The Sheen Of The Silk stirred me to thoughts about Sharon Penman’s Falls The Shadow. The authors’ styles are different (for example, where Perry’s pacing is gentle and even and her prose fluid as, well, silk, Penman’s pacing is dynamic and her prose sprawling but intensely charged), as are their settings. But both novels are complex epics that take place in the 13th century and are concerned with the fate of a country and its people, the machinations of the powerful, and the fiery relationship between spiritual faith and earthly justice. When I suddenly encountered the mention of Simon de Montfort, my heart skipped, making a secret little somersault. Those who have read Falls the Shadow will probably not find Perry’s fleeting allusion to Montfort too cryptic.
The Sheen On The Silk is the first and only book I have read by Anne Perry. I was moved by the story and found myself thinking about it between readings and longing to re-immerse myself in it. It is one of the more memorable novels of historical fiction I have read in years.
A final note. While all the narrative threads are brought to fitting and satisfying conclusions, the end looks to the future, and thus there is an opening for weaving a new novel if the author would be so inclined. (It is not a sequel-bait ending, merely one that offers fresh opportunities for the imagination.) I would unhesitatingly read that related book. For now, having found a new-to-me author whose work intrigues, I am going to take a look at the first installment in Perry’s Victorian-set mystery series about Charlotte and Thomas Pitt.
Excerpt
(Ballantine Books hardcover, 2010, p.338):
“It was a good meal, although she was barely aware of what she ate or of anything beyond the sweetness and fire of the wine. They spoke easily, of all manner of things, places they had been to, people they had met or known. He described the funny and the absurd with pleasure and, she noticed, without cruelty. The more she listened to him, the more irrevocably she felt bound to the good in him. And the less could she ever tell him the truth. He saw her as a man, but one from whom he needed to fear no rivalry. She knew that something of his gentleness with her was because he was a whole man, able to taste the physical pleasures of life in a way Anastasius never would, and she was startled by the delicacy he exercised in never overtly mentioning such things.
She left at about two in the morning, when duty called him up to the deck because the weather was worsening. She had drunk more wine than usual, and she felt so close to weeping as she closed the door of her own cabin that the tears actually spilled over her cheeks, hot and painful. Had she been less exhausted, she might have given in and sobbed until she had nothing left inside her. But when would she stop? What end was there, except to treasure friendship, or laughter, trust, tolerance, and the will to share? She would not sacrifice that for some momentary indulgence in self-pity or grief for what she herself had closed the door against.
The following day the weather was bad, a storm driving down from the north forcing them to stand farther out than they would otherwise. Giuliano was fully occupied with navigation and keeping the ship from drifting onto the dangerous troughs where she could lose sails or even a mast.
The next time they spoke it was the morning watch as dawn was rising from the east, where Cyprus lay far beyond view. The sea was calm and there was a slight breeze, smelling sweet and exquisitely clean, the pale light barely tipping the crests of the water, too delicate to be touched with foam. In the silence, they could have been the first humans to see the earth or breathe its air.”
