The Romantic Armchair Traveller

Canary Islands: The Wind Off The Small Isles by Mary Stewart

 

In an essay published in 1973 Mary Stewart calls The Wind Off The Small Isles “a kind of coda” to the ten gothic and romantic suspense novels that precede it and “a bridge” to The Crystal Cave, her first historical novel (“Teller Of Tales” in Techniques Of The Selling Writer, edited by A. S. Burack, p.42). Now that I have finally had a chance to read the book, I think I can see what Stewart means. A novella of less than a hundred pages, The Wind Off The Small Isles can be inhaled in one quick, casual sitting. But in doing so one risks overlooking the allegory hidden within the simple story of lovers lost and found. For this is Mary Stewart’s dialogue with her own work, a meditation on the writer’s craft and a summing up of her philosophy.

 

A dramatic cliffside property on the coast of Lanzarote seems the perfect location to inspire Cora Gresham’s latest pirate novel for children. But the house is already taken, her secretary, Perdita West, discovers, and by none other than playwright James Blair, the mentor of Cora’s son, Michael. Over drinks on the terrace overlooking the bay the quartet discuss the mystery associated with the place’s history. None of them realise just how harrowingly past and present are about to meet.

 

In several respects The Wind Off The Small Isles is vintage Mary Stewart: the brisk pace, the prose full of flair, the charming characters, a first-person young female narrator (Perdita), romance, danger. There is even a spider-thin connection with This Rough Magic. Above all, there is Stewart's hallmark, the lively setting which is not only integral to but typically the actual inspiration for the story: “This was old lava, from long-ago eruptions, nothing more nor less than a plain of dusty, broken black rock with cutting edges, lightened here and there by the brilliant yellow-green sponges of some succulent, and the phalli of the candelabra cactus, like clustered stands of organ-pipes acid with verdigris” (p. 24). Not even the sunbaked starkness of Stewart’s Grecian settings is as strikingly intense as the primordial alienness of Lanzarote’s volcanic landscape. As Perdita pointedly notes, this inhospitable barrenness with its black lava fields and still active Fire Mountains even attracted the makers of a certain motion picture epic whose title I did not find on IMDB but bears an unmistakable resemblance to One Million Years B.C. (a recent release at the time of Stewart’s novella and indeed filmed on Lanzarote). Whereas these days the Canary Islands have long been a major holiday destination of sun-seeking Europeans, Stewart’s Lanzarote retains a wild, deserted atmosphere, the story having been written shortly before tourism on this easternmost island began to take off. Tellingly, however, a nightclub or restaurant is about to be developed at the far end of the hitherto isolated bay that both Cora and James have identified as an ideal writer’s hideaway. But such signs of taming can be dangerously lulling in an environment where humans remain largely at the mercy of nature. The direction of the wind, for example, affects which way the smoke and ash of volcanic eruptions will blow. (The novella’s title alludes to the islets in the Chinijo archipelago at the northern tip of Lanzarote. In the local vernacular, “Chinijo” means “small”.)

 

At the same time, this is undeniably Mary Stewart in condensed, episodic form. Its brevity means that if one rushes through the book, bent on the resolution, one will get only the bones of a composition that has pleasing symmetry and poetry but in terms of plot and characterisation is slighter than any other fiction Stewart has written for adults. The narrative voice is another difference, beginning to change from the brightly sensible lightness of tone that characterises her early novels. It still recognisable in the brisk and cheery notes of the novella’s contemporary storyline but a clear shift occurs when events deal with the historical subplot. Flippancy and banter disappear, replaced by a graver, solemn tenor and a sharpening focus on the intensely human – rather than the thriller-type – experience of tragedy and violence. (Notice how the cover art displays a more artsy, pared-down variation on the woman-in-jeopardy that in some incarnation or other appeared on almost all editions of Stewart’s books until this one?) Glimpses of this thoughtful sobriety have already been seen in the nostalgic The Ivy Tree and will surface again in her next romance, Touch Not The Cat (1976), a paranormal that in significant ways is more earth-bound than Stewart’s other gothics. Above all, however, the changes in tone herald the voice in Stewart’s Arthurian cycle.

 

So is there any real meat to The Wind Off The Small Isles? Oh yes. As sometimes is the case with books that appear lightweight, the careful reader is rewarded with something quite unique. Every element of this novella appears steeped in symbolic meaning, presenting the reader with an allegory of the creative process. Stewart is not being coy: she makes two of her characters writers and places them on an island where intermittent volcanic activity continues to violently shape and reshape the landscape. Writerly metaphors related to birth and creation are rife, some subtle, many surfacing plainly (of his current script James Blair says: “at present it’s quite hideously in embryo, all beginning and no end” (p.45)). Landscapes, actions, and events build strong symbolism beneath the surface story: our characters motor along bumpy, untravelled roads, admire plants being coaxed from ashen soil, physically knock on doors that do not open. Other symbolism relates to caves that are blindingly dark; traps and dead ends and the digging oneself out from these as from a chrysalis; the struggle for enlightenment; the breakthrough that ignites life and passion. But is this Stewart’s personal commentary on her own work so far or a general assessment of the craft? The answer may lie in a comparison between The Wind Off The Small Isles and Stewart’s interviews and articles.

 

In some of the the exchanges between Cora and Perdita one seems to catch a dialogue between a mature writer and her younger self; in the collegial conversations between Cora and James, the doubts and fears that haunt all authors (or those who have humility), whether literary or popular. “Mrs Gresham”, Perdita muses, “who is nothing if not clear-sighted, once called herself ‘the clown with the normal clown’s urge to play Hamlet’, but this didn’t seem to me to fit the bill. I called it her ‘Sullivan act’ – a finished master of light music breaking his heart to be Verdi. I said: ‘I wish you’d stop tormenting yourself because you’re not Graham Greene or James Blair or Robert Bolt* or someone. The number of people who’d miss ‘Coralie Gray’ [Cora’s pseudonym] if you stopped writing could be laid end to end – ’” (p. 21-2). When Cora disparages her protagonist, James defends the worth of her stories with his childhood love of Beatrix Potter. Mary Stewart, too, has written stories for children. And in her interview segment in Counterpoint (Rand MacNally hardcover edited by Roy Newquist, 1964), she repeatedly mentions her admiration for Graham Greene: “I know I’ve mentioned him before, but he always comes to mind first because he’s the maestro” (p. 568) and “There’s no difference in kind, really, in quality, between Greene’s serious novels and his “entertainments” [...] I certainly don’t put myself in Greene’s category” (p. 564). (Other writers she speaks of with respect range from James Baldwin and Mary Renault to Ian Fleming and Alistair MacLean.)

 

Acknowledging their different treatment by the critical establishment, Cora says to James, “This is one of those coincidences that nobody would believe if you or I put it into print – at least, if you did, they’d say it was a subtle denial of causality, and if I did they’d say it was romantic nonsense ... ” (p. 44). In the Counterpoint interview, Stewart explains “To my mind there are really only two kinds of novels, badly written and well written [...] I do the best I can with material that excites me” (p.564). Her choice of themes are a reflection of her values: “I am first and foremost a teller of tales, but I am also a serious-minded woman who accepts the responsibilities of her job, and that job, if I am to be true to what is in me, is to say with every voice at my command: ‘We must love and imitate the beautiful and the good.’ It is a comment on our age that one hesitates to stand up and say this aloud. But looking back now on the way I was thinking over these fifteen years as I wrote, it seems to me that this above all else is what I have affirmed” ("Teller Of Tales", p.47).

 

Deep-seated fears are less easily dismissed than superficial criticism: James Blair confesses that “For the last few years I’ve been lucky, one thing so to speak begetting the next as I worked, but after Tiger Tiger the vein ran out. [...] It never happened before, and it frightened me to death” (p.45). Interestingly, The Wind Off The Small Isles marks the point where Mary Stewart’s career takes off in a new direction. Some appear to treat this switch as her maturation into a literary writer; in these same circles, her romantic entertainment novels are generally written off as formulaic if polished fluff for the (female) masses. It is a distinction that her assessment of Greene’s output indicates she would politely reject. As she has remarked elsewhere, “one can build a second time, successfully, albeit a different structure and with different materials, but only if one has kept faith with oneself” (“Teller Of Tales”, p.46).

 

And there you have it. The Wind Off The Small Isles is many things: a haunting novella about love, a deftly written allegory, and a simple but confident summing up of one writer’s view of her craft. Readers hoping for the classic, involved fiction of Mary Stewart’s full-length novels will probably feel less enchanted than those familiar with her larger oeuvre and interested in the storyteller herself. Still, even read as a straightforward little tale of love and mystery the novella has artistic merit and emotional impact. Unexpectedly, tears sprung up in my eyes on reading the last page. I know I will revisit this surprisingly lovely book again. For the first time I am also inspired to finally familiarise myself properly with Stewart’s Arthurian cycle, something I always ended up putting off in the past because I could not find a way of bridging the gap between Stewart’s contemporary and historical voices. The Wind Off The Small Isles has shown me the way.

 

*Blair is fictional but Bolt is the author of A Man For All Seasons, the wonderful play about the confrontation between Thomas More and King Henry VIII of England that pitted the former's conscience against the latter's will and command. In the late 1950s Mary Stewart herself authored (at least) four radio plays. Again, in 1964 when asked about her ambitions for the future she replied, among other things, that she would “like to write a play” (Counterpoint, p. 571).

 

Excerpt

(Hodder And Stoughton hardcover, with illustrations by Laurence Irving, 1968, p. 47-8):

 

“Mr Blair took the glass. ‘Yes, I suppose the phrase “the small isles” suggested itself because it was familiar, though heaven help us, we might be on a different planet here.’ He sipped the wine absently, both hands cupping the cool glass, his gaze slowly travelling over the green bubbles of cactus, the black basalt, the glittering sea, the cloudless blue, focussed seemingly not on them or beyond them but on some sharp point of light thrown by them inward into himself, as by a burning-glass. But his voice was ordinary, even faintly apologetic. ‘The story ... As a matter of fact, it’s hardly a story at all, and what there is of it is so ordinary, so much the classic cliché of a love story, that told baldly like this it hardly bears repeating. But there’s something there, if one could find the treatment.’

We all sat watching him. I thought to myself, there’s always something there, if one can find the treatment. The same old material, the same old line, the same old setting – all that counts is the quality of the mind that processes them. And this was the man – I looked up suddenly and caught Mike Gresham watching me. His eyes flickered and he looked away quickly.”

 

Outremer: The King’s Witch by Cecelia Holland

 

In The King’s Witch, Cecelia Holland achieves something all too rare in historical fiction: characters who actually behave like creatures of their time. Furthermore, with one possible exception, she avoids falling in love with her historical protagonists, preserving this thankful reader from yet another of the many glorified fantasy-biographies that glut the romantic historical fiction market. That said, the first thing to be aware of is that the novel’s title and blurb are marketing ploys. While the title character is a female practitioner of medicine, witch hunts were not a phenomenon of the twelfth century and so I am relieved to report that the story is void of any element whatsoever of witchcraft. And instead of supposedly featuring a suspense plot built around espionage, the straightforward drama in The King’s Witch revolves around the collision of idealism and reality during the so-called* Third Crusade. Holland’s vision results in a bleak morality tale that stayed with me for several days – yet not without reservations that started on page one and developed into manifold issues that frequently prevented me from enjoying the actual reading experience.

 

May 1191. On its way to the Holy Land the fleet of English crusaders has been blown off course and temporarily made landfall on Cyprus. After replacing the hostile governor, King Richard of England marries Berengaria of Navarre in name only, citing a vow of chastity in order to answer the call of God with a clean conscience and a pure body. The most respected warrior in Christendom, he is used to getting what he wants, and what he covets is the biggest prize of all: winning Jerusalem back from the Saracens.

His sister Johanna, widowed queen of Sicily, is sceptical of his vow and of the Crusade, which she secretly opposes. As a woman without husband or children her means of influencing policy are limited, but once in Outremer the power squabbles among the international crusaders afford opportunities she cannot resist. To help achieve her ends she involves the woman her mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, another critic of the Crusade, has always trusted.

A healer informally trained in medicine, Edythe is attached to the Crusade first as an attendant to Johanna and later as the personal physician to Richard. What neither knows is that Edythe is the only survivor of her family, Jews of Troyes (in Champagne in modern-day France) killed in an attack on their community. Since the age of thirteen, when she found refuge in Queen Eleanor ’s household, she has pretended to be Christian in accordance with Eleanor’s advice. Out of loyalty to the Plantagenets she finds herself supporting the Crusade. Yet this support confronts her with her secret past: her assignment to keep Eleanor informed of behind-the-scenes affairs involves contacting Jews who can relay messages without attracting suspicion. Before long, she begins to wonder where she truly belongs. It is a decision made all the harder when she falls in love with Rouquin, a Christian knight who is the right-hand man of King Richard and who values integrity above all else.

 

Warning: The discussion of historical events and people in this post contains material that constitutes spoilers for readers unfamiliar with the Third Crusade.

 

In reading The King’s Witch, the first and most persistent obstacle I came up against was the prose. Reviewers of other novels by Cecelia Holland sometimes describe her style as minimalistic. The King’s Witch is my introduction to the author’s work and while I agree that she employs a distinctive linguistic style the adjective that best sums up my impression is “ungainly”. The choppy flow made the first fifty pages a chore until my ear attuned itself to the syntax, the cadence of the sentence structures, and the disjointed subject shifts within paragraphs. Add in a some slangy turns of phrase; French-speakers who nickname Johanna (Fr. Jeanne or Jehanne), one of their own, “Jo”; and blunders concerning the languages used by mediaeval Jews, and the matter of language in The King’s Witch remained an irritant that time and again broke my immersion in the story.

 

The narrative jumps between four viewpoint characters: the principal protagonist, Edythe; Richard (I) of England, one of several Christian rulers set to lead a Crusade to recapture the Latin east from the Muslim conquerors of Jerusalem, Acre, and other sites; Richard’s meddlesome younger sister, Johanna; and Philip de Rançun, nicknamed Rouquin for his red hair, a close relation of Richard and Johanna. This narrative mode does help break complex political and military events into manageable pieces, but in a novel of only three hundred pages it also means that each of the personal storylines is thinned down. The character who arguably suffers most from this treatment is Richard, whose motives and feelings regarding some key events of his Crusade are withheld from the reader. The story perspective is entirely that of overseas people attached to the Crusade (Philip Augustus of France, portrayed as a repulsive coward; Conrad of Montferrat, ambitious and shrewd; Robert de Sablé, demonised Grand Master of the Knights Templar); even the participation of any local Franks is limited (an inept Guy de Lusignan; a dainty Humphrey de Toron; an unhappily married Queen Isabella of Jerusalem). The only Muslim with a speaking voice is the character of Safadin (al-‘Adil, Sayf-al-Dīn), brother of Saladin’s (Ṣalāḥ-al-Dīn), who appears in a cameo and is seen through the eyes of Richard and Rouquin.

 

The effect of this last device is insular, allowing the author to examine the crusader psyche in the context of its own, subjective world view. It can be a risky proposition if the author does not apply critical narrative commentary to her or his prejudicial characters. Cecelia Holland, however, manipulates her characters from the point of view of an observer more than an interpreter, and this creates both (illusory) objectivity and emotional distance. Her method is similar to that of Frans G. Bengtsson in The Long Ships (a Viking adventure yarn set around 1000 C.E., originally published in the 1940s), both adopting a terse style that eschews extraneous description and limits introspection, although Bengtsson goes a step father in striving to keep the tone and spirit of his characters’ thoughts and feelings unfiltered by obvious modern sensibilities. In both novels the reader is invited to make their own judgment about the characters and draw their own moral conclusions. While Holland’s characterisations are not always compelling enough to bridge the distance between the reader and the story caused by this narrative mode, she does leave the reader free to fill in the blanks with subjective interpretations in a way that is fruitful for the imagination and encourages active dialogue with the text.

 

While Elizabeth Chadwick is by far the stronger author when it comes to depicting material culture in the Middle Ages (The Falcons Of Montabard) and Sharon Penman excels at creating poignant, human drama out of complex political history, Holland establishes her own brand of period authenticity by making the religiosity of the times integral to her characterisations. She shows the ever-presence of God in the characters’ thoughts and actions. Richard, for example, measures his worthiness as a Christian by his military success in the Holy Land, which makes his story arc all the more affecting because his gradual belief in his own invincibility is rooted in an arrogance that evokes portentous shades of the fate of Moses. Piety and success are interknit in the minds of other characters too, and it is particularly interesting to see how they attempt to negotiate the letter of whatever deal they feel they have struck with God even as they honour its spirit. The relationship with God is anything but straightforward. In The King’s Witch, the sense of true communion with God is fleeting, a sudden rush of grace, never coming when looked for.

 

It jarred me a little, then, after the care Holland invests in the place of religion in the mediaeval mindset, that faith seems to be no one’s compass. The values and priorities of several characters seem as modern as their behaviour is mediaeval. There is an emphasis on the importance of “being oneself”, a theme that is not limited to a general message but is explicitly stated. The concept of “being true to oneself” would have been foreign to mediaeval Christians whose guiding principle was to be as faithful a Christian as possible. They had a strong incentive to try: the absolute belief in hell. Admittedly, it is a concern that mainly occupies Edythe and hers is a special case, but it pertains to Richard’s character development, too (more about both below). Strikingly, too, the spiritual layering is missing from any arguments characters bring against the Crusade: they are motivated solely by secular concerns. Nobody stops for a moment to consider the conflict between the Christian message of peace and a war supposedly authorised by God. The narrative, too, seems to skirt the question of whether any war can be holy or just. Death and battle are treated in terms of character responses to violence in general, not religious violence. In a story centred on a Crusade this seems quite a significant lack of nuance.

 

It is no small undertaking to de-romanticise a historical figure of such mythological stature as Richard Lionheart. Holland chooses to try to humanise him through focussing on the chinks in his armour: the illnesses he suffered in Outremer, the subject of his sexuality, and his fondness for his sister, Johanna. The author goes even further: Richard’s storyline portrays him as a tragic hero. Only part of this is due to him persisting through all betrayals and challenges and fight to the bitter end to get to Jerusalem even as almost everyone around him gives up.

 

Holland espouses the view, popularised since John Harvey’s The Plantagenets (1948), that Richard was homosexual rather than bisexual, sexually ambivalent, or a misunderstood heterosexual (compare, for example, speculation about the nature of the early relationship between Richard and Philip Augustus versus the common mediaeval custom that saw people of the same sex sharing a bed for practical or amicable, not sexual, reasons). She does it quite beautifully and without sensationalism, and in the process brings a rare vulnerability to this much debated side of Richard’s personality that is both poignant and convincing. The only time a lump appeared in my throat during my reading of this book was in one of Richard’s last scenes, where he faces an unexpected loss amid the ruins of his ambitions.

 

But Holland’s interpretation of Richard also causes considerable manoeuvring that is smoothly plotted if not always logically satisfying. Shortly before his wedding, Richard takes a vow of chastity which in one sweep expresses a crusader’s honourable dedication to God’s work and shrewdly excuses him from conjugal relations. Conveniently, Berengaria (Berenguela/Bérengère), portrayed as young and childish and devout, is afraid of sexual intimacy and accepts the arrangement with relief, her heightened status more than enough to please her. Holland’s argument that Richard would neglect his obligation to try to produce an heir because he has a brother able to succeed him seems a highly irresponsible line of reasoning for a powerful man of his time (and ignores that in the spring of 1191 he named Arthur of Brittany, not John, his heir should he die without issue). And that a commander as feared and respected as Richard would marry merely to placate his mother is another contention the plot does nothing to explain; in consequence, it becomes nonsensical. Nor does Holland address the question of why he would take his bride with him into the midst of war, where either of them could be killed or captured, without any intention of trying to beget an heir as quickly as possible. When Holland’s Richard implies to Johanna that he would prefer the non-consummation of his marriage to remain permanent, and the novel shows that Berengaria is not being singled out, that Richard has no interest in bedding any woman – how, in the absence of explanatory plot points, is the reader meant to reconcile this position with the historical record? Richard sired an illegitimate son – Philip of Cognac – in his youth and, even more to the point, in 1191 – the same year he married Berengaria – made treaty stipulations concerning future heirs of his own body.

 

Berengaria’s childishness in The King’s Witch is a surprise. Her date of birth is unknown, but scholars have calculated that she was in her early to mid-twenties at the time of her marriage (see Berengaria: In Search Of Richard The Lionheart’s Queen by Ann Trindade, Four Courts Press, 1999, p. 20) A mediaeval woman of that age, and most particularly a queen, would reasonably be expected to have her dynastic obligations at the very forefront of her mind, but such pressure is something Holland’s version glosses over entirely. The author’s lack of interest in exploring the relationship between Berengaria and Richard – it is paid scant attention – fails to translate into a portrayal of a marriage of two people who have nothing in common or lack interest in establishing a couplehood identity, and instead becomes a fuzzy non-thing that makes for tedious, implausible fiction. The pair’s last scene in The King’s Witch marks a potential change in their relationship, but its suggestiveness is not developed into any tangible direction. The scene typifies one of several open-ended “resolutions” that combine into a non-ending where the historical characters are concerned. A sequel seems to be waiting in the wings.

 

The heart of the problem with the author’s characterisation of Richard may be his silence about what drives and motivates him. What is the point of making this controversial historical figure a viewpoint character if it brings no unique benefit to the narrative? Granted, the storyline’s focus on the topic of Richard’s sexuality could indicate that in it lies the key to all the reader needs to understand about his inner life; for example, that the matter of divine judgement is never far from his troubled thoughts. Unfortunately, in a crusader story the choice to treat his politics and military leadership as secondary issues to be told through the eyes of others creates a lopsidedness and reader alienation from which his portrayal never recovers. For example, when Richard is seen to order the 2700 Muslim hostages at Acre executed and participates in the massacre, the reader never learns what Richard thinks and feels about this act and its causes and consequences.

 

Similarly narrow is the general depiction of crusading women in The King’s Witch. Their daily life is all to do with interior decoration, love affairs, gardening, scheming, and praying, when they are not cowering in tents during battles. (Readers certainly are not given any idea that some women actually took an active part in the fighting.) Certainly mediaeval women were usually bystanders in big military clashes, but this novel's depiction of their occupations and concerns is dulled by stereotyping. None forge genuine friendships with other women nor, with the exception of Edythe whose profession it is to heal, take the initiative to alleviate the ubiquitous suffering through charitable works.

 

The principal character in the book, Edythe, is a sympathetic heroine whose most prominent story attributes – her Jewishness and her medicine – are paradoxically the least successful parts of a characterisation that seems defined by a rather modern approach to her conundrum. Before I elaborate this point I must say that the very premise for Edythe’s storyline (told in retrospect) requires a certain amount of generosity from the reader: a penniless thirteen-year old Franco-Jewish orphan without powerful connections is welcomed into the imprisoned Eleanor of Aquitaine’s service on the strength of the respect the Queen bore for the girl’s father; is then made one of her favourite personal attendants instead of, say, a serving maid; and during her years at court passes for a lapsed Saxon nun without anyone ever poking the slightest hole in her fictitious backstory.

 

As the novel opens, Edythe has reluctantly accepted a mission from Eleanor to look after Richard and Johanna’s welfare and write progress reports to Eleanor, these to be sent secretly via Jewish networks. Having learnt to pose as a Christian, Edythe feels uncomfortable about seeking out Jewish contacts, and initially experiences no compulsion to be among them for her own sake. In fact, religion and faith seem to carry no personal significance for Edythe. Her internal tug of war between Christianity and Judaism does not play out as a conflict between faiths and heritage but rather as a choice between coverup and honesty. Although she goes through the motion of worshipping in Christian churches she feels no connection with God and exhibits no curiosity about or attraction to the Jewish faith. One could probably make a case for such religious apathy being an unconscious rejection, the effect of a sense of schizophrenia. But the manner in which the narrative ignores religious considerations makes Edythe’s concerns about hiding and wearing a mask seem thoroughly modern because she appears to treat her sense of non-belonging as purely a matter of ethnicity. There is a also curious lack of tension between Edythe’s awareness of being a Jew who is merely pretending to be a Christian no matter how hard she tries to live like one and her pain at the gruesome deaths of her parents and siblings, murdered by Christians. For example, it never occurs to her to contemplate whether Saracen victories might be seen as some form of vengeance against a people who have killed and oppressed hers.

 

The Jewish component in The King’s Witch, so thin it sometimes feels nominal, appears shaky in its details. For example, the author has King Richard calling the language of the Jews in Troyes (in Champagne, a province of modern-day France) “Zephardic” without any corrective commentary. Perhaps the word intended is “Zarphatic”, a decidedly modern term (Yiddish: A Survey And A Grammar, 1979, p.33) for the written form of the French spoken by the Jews of northern France. Edythe is supposedly speaking with a trace of a non-French accent due to her background even though the linguistic differences between the Christians and Jews of Troyes were minimal: the vernacular of both groups was the Champenois dialect of Old French. And if, as the story asserts, Edythe’s father instructed her in medicine, why did he not give her the means to study his medical treatise? In other words, why has she been taught to speak Hebrew if not for the express purpose of being able to read a language (or characters) that was reserved for liturgy and the written word? As for her ability to converse with Cypriot and Holy Land Jews, whose mother tongue would have been Greek (Yavanic/Yevanic) or Arabic, well, she is lucky to only run into those learned or international enough to have studied Hebrew or French. (Side note: The Devil's Door by Sharan Newman is a romantic mystery partially set among the Jewish community of twelfth-century Troyes.)

 

Turning to Edythe’s role as the personal physician of King Richard, the concept has promising potential, not least the “physician, heal thyself”-element and the freedom it allows Edythe to roam beyond customary women’s confines and interact with people of every class. Again, scepticism needs to be overcome in order to accept Edythe’s career credentials. Has anyone tutored her in medicine after she lost her father, a doctor, when she was thirteen? Otherwise, as a provider mainly of “potions and philtres” to court ladies, how has this empiric maintained and advanced her healing skills to the point where she gains royal preference over experienced, university-educated doctors? To obtain the herbs she needs, why does she rely only on markets and apothecaries, never considering that she might grow some herself? (Meanwhile, Berengaria plants an entire (anachronistic) flower garden.) And why, as a medical practitioner, does she never once express curiosity about Muslim medicine, famed throughout the mediaeval world? Her profession seems a character dress, successful as a plot device but empty of deeper meaning. For example, her treatment of bodily ills is all about the importance of balanced humours and the proper application of herbs; it never expands into a wider theme about the connection between body and soul. When a sick character broods about sin and sinning it is outside any mediaeval spiritual context such as theories that illness is an earthly purge of sins that speeds the path to heaven or, alternatively, a symptom of a wicked soul. Perhaps that disconnect explains why the narrative does not assign Edythe any qualms about medical ethics in a battle scene where her disguise as a squire makes her refrain from tending the injured.

 

In the novel's afterword, Cecelia Holland defends the verisimilitude of Edythe becoming Richard’s personal medical attendant by making reference to the female doctor Louis IX brought along on his Crusade in the following century. (Her name was Hersende/Hersent and she was married to the royal apothecary.) It is certainly true that female practioners did exist in a range of mediaeval medical fields (their marginalisation means that few names have survived). However, as Piers D. Mitchell notes about King Louis’s (and Queen Marguerite’s) doctor: “An educated female physician was unusual in the thirteenth century, and it was especially extraordinary for her to be so well respected that she should become personal physician to one of the major kings in Europe. Her position and the title magistre Hersende, physica suggest she may have had a university education” (Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon, 2004, p. 19.) In view of the problems I have noted above, Edythe’s appointment seems to be stretching credibility to the utmost. In the end, it was something I was willing to live with in the name of artistic expression, if only because I liked the character’s unassuming, sensitive, and self-reliant nature and wanted her to find happiness.

 

An unusual combination of uncosmetic realism regarding mediaeval gender politics and a relationship development defined by popular romance tropes makes Edythe and Rouquin’s love story a narrow but conspicuous thread of red in a decidedly grey-toned narrative. The subplot grows more prominent in the second half of the story where it complements and completes the character storylines without overwhelming the general story. Edythe’s pilgrimage to find her place in the world takes precedence, and romantic love is a stage in that process, not its goal. With Rouquin, for the most part, what you see is what you get: an unvarnished mediaeval male in his attitude to women, a knightly retainer of integrity but no patience for courtliness who increasingly balks at the imbalance of loyalty in his relationship with the Plantagenets. He does carry a secret which, if he is meant to be a reliable narrator, is a fanciful fictional twist that mines up-to-date genealogy research but switches years. (Clue for those wanting spoilers: Andrew W. Lewis’s essay in Eleanor Of Aquitaine: Lord And Lady edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John C. Parsons, p. 161 in my 2008 edition; alternatively, Holland’s previous novel, The Secret Eleanor, which I assume deals with the background to the secret.) Nevertheless, there seems very little point to including the secret since it carries no plot consequences and since Rouquin’s storyline neglects the opportunity to incorporate it in any sort of “what if” scenario.

 

One of the things I found most striking about The King’s Witch is its atmosphere of pessimism and resignation. From the beginning the story takes a cynical view of the Crusading army and the plot has an unabating undertone of frustration, anxiety, and loneliness. While the actual and metaphorical Jerusalem fuels several characters’ imaginations and/or ambitions, the crusader goals are individualistic instead of communal and so the Promised Land increasingly begins to resemble a mirage, and the confident enterprise sinks into a struggle darkened by relentless death and deprivation. Even the landscape of Holland’s Latin East is desolate: charred and rotten cities surrounded by sand and blood. (The desertlike barrenness is effective dramatically but gives a misleading impression of the actual terrain, which from Ascalon to Acre and east into the mountain valleys of Judea was prime agricultural land.)

 

In the end, this buildup of drama fizzles because the internal devastation of the characters simply does not live up to the external debacle. At the time of the Crusades, Christian nations considered the Holy Land to be a region that had been theirs since the time of the Apostles, a territory rightfully belonging to the Church (via the Eastern Roman Empire), now lost to the enemies of Christ. Therefore, to the early crusading nations in particular (before canon law institutionalised the concept of crusading in the thirteenth century) this was not all about a free-for-all, wealth-building invasion for ambitious power seekers. The call to relieve Jerusalem and rescue the Holy Sepulchre from infidels was no mere propaganda exercise by religious fanatics. Yet in The King’s Witch, the fact that the Crusade falls apart has no spiritual ramifications for the characters. To them – in line with modern reasoning – the blame for failure rests with insufficient funding, undisciplined troops, incompetent leaders, and factional quarrels that cause internal division and defection. Disillusioned (in some cases even relieved), they pack up and leave. But to the mediaeval mind such problems were actually only symptoms of something much worse. To them, defeat was a judgment from God: their sinfulness had made them unworthy of ushering in the era of Christ’s reign on earth. That was cause for more than disillusionment: it meant fear and despair and, in a sense, hell on earth. Yet of all the many characters in The King’s Witch, Richard alone is burdened by such attitudes. As he mourns his shattered dreams, however, it is his personal failings that haunt him; the problem that the biggest enterprise of Christendom lies in ruins is a side issue. Furthermore, with its emphasis on funds withheld and the desertion of allied troops the plot arguably absolves him of the blame he places on himself. What the novel is left with is a feckless climax and a straggly ending narrowly saved by the romantic subplot. (A last-minute attempt at thriller-type suspense involving Edythe is embarrassingly ill-advised and best forgotten.)

 

If there is an overarching theme in The King’s Witch it is perhaps that history does not stand still. It does not stop with victory or defeat. It streams past and through everything, making every achievement and failure, every victory and defeat, a fleeting, transitional, shifting thing. Anything humans can do is very limited. In the big scheme of things, an individual is small and helplessness. The characters grapple with the futility of trying to direct great affairs, and with the powerlessness of the powerful who lose their people’s loyalty. The only control anyone has is over who one personally is, which necessitates being truthful to oneself and to others - even love becomes a shackle if the giver and the receiver keep secrets from each other. The powerfulness of this theme may be the book's greatest strength.

 

Finally I must note that although The King’s Witch can be read as a standalone novel it seems to form part of a larger story. Continuous reference (often through letters which whizz in and out of Outremer with remarkable speed) to preceding events and off-page characters indicate plot links to Holland’s previous novel, The Secret Eleanor, and the foreshadowing regarding some of the historical characters points to future publications. (The plot of The King’s Witch concludes in September 1192.) To my chagrin I was not aware of such a series until after I had begun reading. Only after unpacking the book and examining the cover did I notice a small banner I had overlooked when ordering the novel: below the title is printed “Heirs Of Eleanor Of Aquitaine”. I do wish the blurb had mentioned a series, because I am not a fan of them and have no inclination to pick up The Secret Eleanor. The mythology surrounding the fragmentary direct references involving Eleanor of Aquitaine in archival sources is so thick that speculation has alchemised into fact (recent research would probably necessitate revision of some of the conclusions in the linked article, but the premise remains valid), and The King's Witch gives me no reason to believe The Secret Eleanor dispenses with legend (on the contrary). Instead, how about bringing some fresh faces into the mediaeval scene? Historical fiction these days appears to be all about marquee names, but I cannot see why Ermengarde of Narbonne, a once famous contemporary of Eleanor, should not qualify.

 

Many readers of historical fiction profess deep admiration for Cecelia Holland’s work. The King’s Witch is not a novel that persuades me to join their ranks, but I am going to try another to find out if her earlier work leaves me less conflicted. I perceive, for example, a fluency of voice and style in the first chapter of Great Maria that feels like balm after the tortured choppiness of The King’s Witch. Meanwhile, it is unfortunately difficult to avoid treating The King’s Witch like an appetiser to Sharon Penman’s forthcoming Lionheart. Although there is no guarantee that Penman’s perspective will bring anything fresh or that her story will carry greater resonance, the size and scope of her novels and the ideas and theories her narratives so dynamically propound promise intellectual and emotional stimulation with which Holland’s lean and dry offering with its bleak characters cannot compete. Ironically, I enjoyed The King’s Witch considerably more after closing its pages than while reading it: the narrative themes inspired reflection, but too many half-baked elements resulted in a dissatisfying story in which I struggled to discern the hand of a master of the genre.

 

*As the author notes in her afterword, what we today call the Crusades (a term not in common usage in the twelfth century) was not a coherent movement or clearly ordered sequence of single, officially organised expeditions. Any serious attempt at numbering them depends on which activities and events one defines as a Crusade and which geographic locations and even the spiritual goals/loyalties/responses one includes in that definition.

 

This is my sixth entry in the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge, hosted by Historical Tapestry.

 

Sahara: The Salt Road by Jane Johnson

 

A romantic novel of belonging and identity, The Salt Road by Jane Johnson immerses the reader in the world of a marginalised culture, the Sahara of the Tuaregs* (Kel Tamasheq/Kel Tagelmust). While the ingredients are those of a kitchen-sink melodrama, Johnson’s anthropologically detailed depictions of tribal life carry such esoteric allure that her fiction often – and beautifully – transcends predictability. Featuring an emotional mystery and a phenomenal Targuia protagonist whose journey along the proverbial and literal Salt Road of life and death is the strong heart of the story, Johnson’s novel offers exceptional thrills for armchair travellers.

 

A silver amulet inscribed with cryptic signs inspires a set of events that leads Isabelle Treslove-Facett on a climbing trip to Morocco. The accident that disrupts her plans plunges her into the midst of people and places that force her to examine why she has always felt an outsider, and what happened to change her from a free-spirited child to an adult constricted by fears.

In the Sahara, Mariata ult Yemma ult Tofenat of the Kel Taitok (Taituq/Taïtoq) is fiercely proud of her descent from Tin Hinan, the queen the Tuaregs revere as “The Mother Of Us All”. But the changes that sweep the Sahara are beginning to encroach on a nomadic lifestyle previously taken for granted, and when the freedoms traditionally guaranteed her as a Targuia become threatened, she embarks on a journey that will lead to passionate love and and violent tragedy.

Separated by time and distance, only when the right connection is made can either woman find the answers they seek.

 

The Salt Road epitomises the concept of place as character. A naturalised resident of Morocco, author Jane Johnson incorporates her observations of landscape and culture with a command of prose and technical skill that builds a dynamic, fully-realised world as opposed to a prettily described travelogue (a trait of the previous Sahara-set novel I posted about, Footprints In The Sand). The story grows organically out of the setting, a meshing that makes The Salt Road a heady experience for the fiction reader who relishes locales so vividly rendered they give documentaries a run for the money. The wealth of places that play a direct or indirect role does cry out for a map which unfortunately is not provided in my edition (Doubleday Canada hardcover, 2011); they include numerous locations in Morocco, Alger, Niger, Mauritania, and Mali. For example, by studying an ethnographic map of the Tuareg heartland as well as its distance to Morocco the true enormity of Mariata’s treks becomes much clearer. (While the shadowed areas on the map on the left indicate Tuareg areas in Mali and Niger, all names on the map starting with "Kel" denote Tuareg confederations.)

 

The plot opens with a multi-part mystery and evolves through dual storylines that are fitted together with great intricacy. The novel is structured in a way that presumably is intended to keep the reader in suspense about the connection between the amulet and the two principal protagonists until the end. A tinge of mysticism suggests possibilities related to time-slips or reincarnation. However, too much is telegraphed in the opening chapers, and when in addition close reading reveals clues that place Mariata in a specific time period, the veil of intrigue surrounding the plot is removed before the story has reached the halfway mark. It is therefore a credit to Johnson’s storytelling abilities that while the dénouement may be short in surprises she makes the journey there enthralling enough to be a satisfying end in itself. Moreover, anti-climactic or not, it is a neat - if a little breathless – conclusion that sweetly fulfills the story promise. (Unless, in concert with some of the reviews I scanned before acquiring my copy, you have been led by Johnson’s literate prose into believing that you are reading unsentimental literary fiction, in which case certain fairy-tale elements may drive you to feel the ending is tragic for all the wrong reasons.)

 

The novel’s set-up can be separated into three parts: Isabelle’s storyline, which is narrated in first person and after an intriguing start begins to read like generic women’s fiction; Mariata’s storyline – told in third person-point of view – which, were it to be detached, could easily function as a solid, multi-faceted novel in itself; and the mystery which forms a frame and joins the two halves together. Unfortunately, the contrast in interest and power between the storylines produces an effect similar to fitting a quality frame around a glowing original oil, then sticking in an inkjet print to complement the whole. On its own, there is nothing awfully wrong with Isabelle’s story. Yet compared to the vitality of the indomitable Mariata, Isabelle appears pouty and vapid, and the banality of her growth arc flattens a plotline that relies on coincidence and improbability to keep up with the excitement of the discovery-factor inherent in Mariata’s adventure-filled tribal life.

 

It seems the lot of Isabelle to be chastised throughout the story. Raised by parents who caused her to feel like an intruder and crushed her spirit, it is in the act of pursuing the one activity where she feels in control of her fears that she is dumped – painfully - into the lap of an alien culture she does not understand and that judges her for her Westernness every step of the way. (Cultural prejudice is a motif in this book full of confrontational characters, and not limited to any one group). With her horribly dysfunctional childhood (there is even more darkness to it than it as first apparent) and her initially unwilling pilgrimage of the soul, she should be as fascinating as Mariata. Her sense of self is deeply buried within a past she exerts all her power to forget, refusing to face how trapped it holds her until an accident makes her restless body, too, a prison. The gradual loss of various freedoms that forces her to re-examine her identity is an intriguingly conceived plotline. I only wish the rest of her character development had been as convincing. However, since her problems are largely blamed on Western selfishness there is no reason for her character to work on toxic personality traits. Instead, it is her awakening to the virtues of another culture that achieves her transformation. Now, my scepticism is certainly not directed against the idea that experiencing other cultures can have a transformative influence on a person. But Isabelle, a successful corporate tax accountant, turns out to be a frustratingly dim traveller whose personal insecurities leave her flailing and spineless in the face of adversity. There is a blatant stageyness to the way in which she is made to see the error of her ways (such as having chosen a job which involves finding tax loopholes for rich corporations that prey on the poor). Thus, when this wealthy woman gives away her luxury watch to a nomadic child to use as a plaything in a “poignant” scene that marks how she has progressed and started to re-evaluate what truly matters, this reader’s response was rather uncharitable.

 

Overall, the political elements in the parts of the book dealing with Isabelle have a one-dimensionality that put me in mind of the zeal of the newly converted. This being a novel, its handling is perhaps more a problem of technique than of political or social subtext, although well-motivated reasoning tends to carry more weight than random claims. (The narrative's position on slavery in Tuareg society, for example, is very defensive and dismisses any debate.) The elegiac passion for the Berber and Tuareg cause that infuses the book eventually, in the plot involving Isabelle, ramps up from an appeal to respect and preserve a civilisation in trouble to a finale so crammed with clumsy information dumping that plot temporarily disappears into a political manifesto.

 

By contrast, Mariata’s storyline virtually bursts with colour and joy of storytelling. Full of exhilarating twists and turns, of passion and strength and drama, it exudes everything that is fun, touching, and satisfying about the best commercial fiction. With outward stoicism and internal fire, Mariata never gives up. She finds inspiration in her noble ancestor, and fights tooth and nail for her dreams and those she loves. No humiliation or injustice she experiences ever induces her to feel inferior or unworthy. In every way that matters to her she is a free woman, the opposite of Isabelle who feels trapped every way except financially. Remarkably, Mariata’s independence is no mere fictional invention by an author caught up in romantic fantasies about Tuaregs. More about this further down.

 

The fluency with which Johnson weaves complex social, political, and cultural strands together in The Salt Road is one of the novel's most notable achievements. To get an idea of what this entails it is worth taking a moment to condider the socio-political context for the story. The following is my beginner’s attempt to summarise points that have bearing on Johnson’s narrative. Please note, however, that the interpretation is my own, not an account of views or opinions expressed in the novel.

 

Particularly in the last half century Berber (pl. Imazaghen, sing. Amazigh) identity in western North Africa (Tamazgha/Maghreb) has been suppressed by a cultural and political system of domination referred to as Arabisation. The problem is not with Islam, which has been adopted by many Berbers, including Tuaregs (there are Jewish and Christian Berbers, too). Historically, Arabs are relative newcomers (late 7th century) to an area inhabited by ethnically-varied, non-Semitic indigenous peoples collectively known as Berbers. Berber assimilation of a long line of foreign conquerors (Romans, Vandals, Christian Eastern Romans (i.e. Byzantines), Arab Bedouins, French, and Spanish) ultimately led to a situation where the Berber language (dialects grouped together as Tamasheq/Tamazight) and customs became treated as if their practitioners were a minority. For example, it was only in 2003 that Morocco officially approved the teaching of Tamazight in schools. The written form of the language, Tifinagh, has been a contested issue as some Moroccan groups have pushed for Tamazight to be taught using the Arabic or Latin alphabet instead. Arabic is still the only official language of the country in spite of estimations that Tamazight is in fact spoken by around half the population.

 

Among the most marginalised are the Tuaregs, that is, Berbers who nomadised the Sahara. Once powerful trans-Saharan traders of luxury goods and slaves, travelling caravan routes (such as the Salt Road) from north-western Africa to cosmopolitan towns along the Mediterranean, they are now among the poorest groups in North Africa. Romanticised in the West as the noble and mystical Blue People, caught up in conflicts with Saharan governments in a deadly morass of mutual accusations of racism, violent persecution, and barbarism, one of few things that seem to be agreed upon by outsiders is that Tuareg numbers have dwindled (estimates range from about one to three million). Desertification, including severe droughts in the twentieth century, as well as the imposition of border controls that disrupt nomadism, have done their part in causing migration to urban areas. Even so, some observers detect small signs of revival, noting that it is an ancient and hardy culture capable of intelligent adjustment.

 

These tensions colour the narrative in The Salt Road and contribute to its rich, authentic feel, particularly in Mariata’s storyline. For example, Tuareg customs and the nobility of her maternal heritage support Mariata’s independence. It is a partially matrilinear society in which status is inherited through the maternal line and women have no obligation to wear veils (links to an interesting but dated article, so read with caution) but modesty and respect require men to cover their faces. Women own and dispose over their own property, and retain custody of their children after divorce, which they can initiate. Johnson shows them doing this and more, including choosing their own husbands, for example, and that before marriage, if done discreetly, it is acceptable for girls to have lovers. It is modern society, including the pressure of institutionalised religion, that threatens to take these rights and privileges away from Mariata by diminishing the status of women in Tuareg society.

 

Mariata’s poetry illustrates the prominence of women in Tuareg oral traditions and music (the Imzad, a single-stringed violin, is reserved for female musicians). Incidentally, I was amused to discover, in Art Of Being Tuareg (see books of related interest, below), which contains a chapter each on poetry and music, to find a poem in which a woman by the same name is mentioned: “Manta and Halban of the long braids/and Mariata, beloved by the young/is frugal with herself, with that which pleases”. The description fits.

 

Meanwhile, Taïb represents the sedentary Berber. Surprisingly, although he is a principal character and Isabelle’s eventual love interest, we learn less about his background than about many secondary and minor characters. An international businessman, he carries on the traditions of his Tuareg forebears, but as an urban dweller his knowledge of his nomadic heritage is vague and theoretical, not practical. Unlike the Tuareg characters, he and several other citified Berbers are known to the reader only by their first names, not their lineage (ag (son of) [father], ult (daughter of) [mother]) or family name. It may be intended to symbolise how cut off or alienated they are from their heritage, but in Taïb’s case it also accentuates the slenderness of his characterisation.

 

As Isabelle’s de facto guide, Taïb lacks flavour and individuality. In fact, I would argue that the way he is used, or rather unused, makes his presence in the story superfluous. If one were to replace him with one or more stock characters of either sex who air the same generic sentiments and let them drift, like he does, in and out around the periphery of the plotline, the trajectory of Isabelle’s development and the outcome of the mystery would remain substantially unaffected. Whatever your genre of fiction, literary or popular, if you have a mission to inform or educate readers, you either need, at a minimum, to carefully explore events that illustrate the point you are trying to make, or create characters whose personal struggles embody the issue. Mariata is a case in point of successful application of this principle; Taïb, the pallid opposite. An intermediary who facilitates Isabelle’s interactions with more creatively imagined characters who unlike him actually hold clues and answers and do things that drive the plot forward, he seems there primarily to allow a pretty bow to be tied around the resolution of Isabelle’s storyline.

 

Even there, however, as the couple of a “love builds bridges where there are none”-romance - if the perfunctory development of a romantic subplot so nebulous can be called that - the two fail to convince. Worse, the flimsiness weakens the persuasiveness of Isabelle’s storyline. Putting Isabelle really on her own in Morocco could have forced something more interesting out of her, or, alternatively, giving her an active, insightful partner or other intelligent foil could have resulted in real conflict that demonstrates issues of colonisation, exploitation, and marginalisation. But instead of a romance that deepens characterisation and interaction that forces debate we are stuck with two people who rather than communicate spout preachy slogans or combative opinions in snapshot fashion. It was difficult for me to grasp what exactly Taïb admires or respects in a woman who protests, complains, distrusts, and shies away from everything that is new or unexpected to her – and as an ignorant, impatient first-time tourist in Morocco, possessed of a petulant nature, who puts herself at the mercies of local strangers, that pretty much encompasses every moment of every day. It was equally unclear to me why Isabelle falls for this particular man, not merely for his culture.

 

Then again, none of the male characterisations in The Salt Road reach anywhere near the substance or complexity of Johnson’s female creations, even the secondary ones. This story belongs to its women, young and old. (Belief in spirits has a prominent place in the culture the story explores, and that is what the male characters often resembled: wraith-like creatures in a world of wonderfully real, strong-willed women.) Even so, The Salt Road is deeply romantic in its approach to the place of love in a person’s life and its healing effect. Rather than taking the customary approach of condensing romance/love to specific courtship/family scenes, the author often makes its effect come vibrantly (and touchingly) through in character attitudes to the tribulations that buffet their lives and the strength they find in hope.

 

Jane Johnson is a happy author discovery for me. With The Salt Road she has crafted literate entertainment that excites the senses even as it informs. In other words, pure wish fulfillment for armchair travellers. Still, whereas the fascinating descriptions of Tuareg life, the careful unfolding of intense private dramas, and the poignant puzzle all crackle with storytelling vigour, if you are of the opinion that details bog down a story and you primarily require a snappy tempo and flashy mystery, then this may not be the book for you. The thoughtful but interest-filled pace echoes the musings of an elderly character in the novel: “all stories have their own way of being told and can never be hurried” (page 288). The Salt Road heeds the advice, and I am glad that it does.

 

^*Tuareg (sing. Targuia (f), Targui (m)) is the most widely used term for groups of people who call themselves Kel Tamasheq (The Free People), Kel Tagelmust (People Of The Veil), or Imazaghen (Berber). While the origins of ‘Tuareg’ may be pejorative, Jane Johnson uses the term as a modern shorthand.

 

A lengthy excerpt from The Salt Road (chapter five) can be read at Johnson’s website. It introduces the reader to Mariata and is an excellent representation of the author’s style.

 

Non-fiction of related interest: The inclusion of works in French in the appended reading list in The Salt Road reflects the relative scarcity of quality printed sources and Internet articles in English, a difficulty I encountered when researching links for this post. The blog Tuareg Culture And News comments on the proliferation of popular myths in the media and recommends The Pastoral Tuareg: Ecology, Culture, and Society (Carlsberg Nomad Series) by Johannes Nicolaisen and Ida Nicolaisen as “the most authoritative, comprehensive ethnography on Tuareg culture in English” despite the fact that its original publication dates back to 1963 (latest printing by Thames and Hudson, 1997). Since that post, however, Tuareg Society Within A Globilized World: Saharan Life In Transition (Tauris, 2010) edited by Anja Fischer (German site, but lots of photos) and Ines Kohl has been released. The publishers claim “this book is the first comprehensive study of the Tuareg today”. The apparent companion book to a noted exhibition, Art Of Being Tuareg: Sahara Nomads In A Modern World, receives at least one mixed review: “the title is not only ethnocentric, it is misleading: The book is not really about today's nomadic Tuareg in the Sahara. It is rather a book about sedentary silversmiths, their families, and their crafts in a place called Agadez, Republic of Niger”. The reviewer goes on to points out that “In their foreword, Thomas K. Seligman (interview), director of the Cantor Arts Center, and Marla C. Berns, director of the UCLA Fowler Museum, thank Hermès, the famed French couture house, for its support. Hermès, as a global player, is commissioning silver pieces from silversmiths in Agadez for the Paris-based fashion house. This is a positive development, as it provides skilled craftsmen with a secure income. In practice, however, the silversmiths are dependent on some French intermediaries who do the designs and who have established ties with Hermès. Another problematic story concerns the printing of images of classic Berber jewelry and Tuareg leather bags on Hermès silk scarves. Are they "Tuareg-inspired designs," (p. 265) or are they copies of Tuareg designs, taken, and reproduced for Hermès' commercial benefit? Does Hermès pay any copyright fees to the Tuareg community?” I have quoted this part of the review in full because there are tangents to characters and developments in The Salt Road. An important secondary character is a smith (enad), and this person's arts and craftmanship play an interesting role in the novel. But the novel’s last chapter also makes positive mention of another character’s “thriving trade in commissioned artefacts for the American and European collectors’ market”, and there is no commentary that would address the concerns raised by the reviewer of Art Of Being Tuareg. Finally, a comprehensive, non-analytical summary and brief review note of The Tuaregs: The Blue People by Karl-G. Prasse concludes that this book serves as a useful general introduction; it is also one of the sources listed by Johnson.

 

Georgia: The Girl King by Meg Clothier

 

For lovers of mainstream historical fiction who have been pining for a holiday from Tudor courts and the French Revolution, The Girl King* by Meg Clothier at first glance promises an exciting change of pace. Set amid the Caucasus mountains between the Black and Caspian Seas and featuring a queen regnant whose life easily rivals that of her contemporary, Eleanor of Aquitaine, The Girl King seems bound to entertain by merit of its fascinating subject alone. Surprisingly, the author decides her historical material is not sufficiently eye-popping and, in her own words, “massages” it to further her adventure yarn. Had Meg Clothier redirected such efforts to the frequently draft-like shallowness of her debut novel, The Girl King might have resulted in a read more worthy of its heroine, one of the great mediaeval luminaries.

 

1177**. When King Giorgi III accepts that he will produce no male heir, his elder daughter’s life catapults into unprecedented prominence. No woman has ever ruled Georgia, a soldierly society riven by hostile neighbours and blood-soaked internal power struggles. The nobles revolt.

A girl still, Tamar is sent into hiding for her own protection. Adapting to the rudimentary way of life in the mountains fosters her self-reliance, a quality that is tested when betrayal destroys her safehaven. The mountains also acquaint her with Soslani, an adolescent Alan nobleman whose patronising ways amuse and irritate her even as peril leads to an unexpected bond.

On her father’s death, Tamar’s survival rests in the hands of noblemen who have long resented Giorgi III’s tyranny and refuse to be led by a female sovereign. Only grievous concessions can save her. But what will that mean for her country – and her heart?

 

Warning: This post contains discussions of historical material and plot points that some readers are likely to consider spoiler territory.

 

“The Most High Queen Tamar, by the Will of Our Lord, King of Kings and Queen of Queens of Abkhazians, Kartvelians, Ranians, Kakhetians and Armenians, Shirvanshah and Shahanshah and Sovereign of All the East and West”, “Glory of the World and Faith”, “Champion of the Messiah”.

 

Thus was Queen Tamar (T'amar, Thamar, Tamara) the Great of Georgia (Bagratid dynasty) eulogised by her contemporaries. The dramatic circumstances of her life and times really call for an epic, and that is the first challenge faced by The Girl King. Despite the trade paperback format the book is short: just over three hundred pages of sparse text in a largish font. A disappointment but not automatically a problem is that the story only covers the earliest period of her accession, not how the kingdom of Georgia (Kartvelia/Sakartvelo) transformed into an empire under her rule or the cultural, scientific, political and religious feats that mark her trailblazing (and mythologised) reign as the Golden Age of Georgian (Kartvelian) history. Thirdly, the storyline shifts between two parallel coming-of-age narratives that eventually tangle in a coltish romantic thread which further narrows the scope of an already pared-down plot. In consequence, the trials and triumphs that made Tamar a legend in her own lifetime and earned her canonization by the Georgian Orthodox Church and an enduring place at the forefront of Georgian history, receive short shrift. (The author note does not mention whether a sequel will be forthcoming; the style of the epilogue would suggest not.)

 

Clothier attempts to resolve some of these limitations by manipulating historical chronology, which she blurs or conflates outright. For example, whereas in reality more than a decade separated Tamar’s second marriage (1187/1189) from a later, renowned military victory (c.1202/1205), in the novel that battle has been moved to the period between her two marriages. The plot climax involves another major fusion of separate events. Likewise, during the last six years of her father’s reign Tamar apprenticed by his side as co-regent (he crowned her in 1178), yet the impression given by the over-simplified, episodic plotline of The Girl King – which carefully refrains from the inclusion of dates as time markers – is of a span of perhaps a year, when in fact her second coronation, on Giorgi’s death, took place in 1184. Tellingly, when a character who has been absent from the story suddenly returns to the scene as the parent of two children, my first reaction was a confused “wait...what?”

 

This vagueness is due not only to the interference with chronology but to a style of storytelling that is spare to the point of sketchy. The downside of a plot structure and stylistic texture that are the equivalent of coarse linen is that the rough, loose weave cannot accommodate fine detail. What is gained in vigour and an atmosphere that accentuates the starkness of the setting has to be weighed against what is lost in complexity. Unfortunately, the sort of deep focus and close observation that would provide nuance and subtlety is entirely missing from Clothier’s story. In terms of a character study of Tamar readers have to content themselves with a charcoal outline.

 

Sometimes authors appear uncertain of how much they can rely on their readers’ ability to put two and two together. Clothier exhibits no such concern, but it leads to the opposite problem, namely a dearth of information that would illuminate character behaviour and histories. For example, it is stated in the book that Tamar’s aunt, Rusudan, had been banished from court, but the reason remains unclear. (Her marriages, which seem relevant in the context of Georgian attitudes to the Seljuks, are never mentioned.) The cold pragmatism that characterises the women’s relationship in the book is plausible yet neglects to address the curiosity that the historic Tamar named her daughter Rusudan. It may have been in honor of Tamar’s sister, another Rusudan, but the very existence of that sister is apparently based on a single historical source (according to Anthony Eastmond - see books of related interest, below). Similarly, Tamar’s mother is an extremely distant character in The Girl King, weepy and withdrawn, but it is up to the reader to scrape together haphazard crumbs of secondary information in order to be able to even speculate about a cause.

 

In addition, there are problematic instances of the telling-rather-than-showing-variety. No background is shown for the poisonous relationship between Tamar and her younger sister (in the book called Susa), but an out-of-the-blue confession about sibling rivalry, very late in the story, is supposed to make readers dismiss the sisters’ previous absence of any compassionate feelings toward each other and believe in their instantaneous dearest-of-friends-attitude. Then again, throughout the story there is a marked lack of character introspection, of attention to motives and feelings. Characters brusquely forge ahead with whatever they are doing next without pausing to dwell on what has gone before. At best, it keeps the pace brisk and indicates a rough, no-nonsense society; at worst, it tends to make the characters seem uniformly naïve and emotionally detached.

 

Coldness is actually a pervasive theme in the novel, and is particularly striking where characters’ family relationships are concerned. The ties between husbands, wives, daughters, mothers, sons, fathers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and cousins are characterised by feelings of disdain, hatred, fear, numbness, resentment, coldness, rivalry, aloofness, and casual murderousness. The implication is that power battles (emotional as well as political) are playing a part in this hostile dynamic, but as the pattern is given no analytical treatment whatsoever, nor being compared to or contrasted with outside enemies or threats to the country, it produces the presumably unintended effect of dousing reader sympathy as well as affecting believability. In regards to the latter, Tamar and Soslani have not a single model for a loving, sexually intimate relationship (which never occurs to either of them) or even an unselfish, close bond with another family member, yet this has no psychological consequences as they gravitate toward each other.

 

The theme of coldness succeeds much better when applied to the physical environment, where it creates strong atmosphere (Clothier’s spare prose occasionally spurts into lyricism when descriptions of nature are involved). Icy mountain winds and the fresh air of the plains are a constant in the story, breezing through rooms that are infallibly draughty, cold, and low on comforts. Things appear crude, makeshift, the splendourous sophistication of Constantinople by turns envied and disdained by a population that equates war and simplicity with manliness, and peace and finery with weakness. In a parallel to the open-air settings of most scenes, Tamar’s spirit and personality rebel against containment. She is always reaching for the out-of-doors experience, the unshuttered window, the untrammelled manner of dress, while other noblewomen are shown huddled by fires or covered in veils, their tastes attuned to what men and women alike judge to be appropriately feminine pursuits and concerns. Palace life is an environment in which Tamar feels stifled but she eventually learns that for a female ruler birth, courage, and ability are not enough, that the mastery of court diplomacy is key to her survival.

 

Tamar descends from a line of feared, autocratic rulers and has grown up in an environment of constant warfare and bloodshed. Fighting men are idolised, women dismissed as weaklings. In her childhood Tamar imbibes battle stories like milk: “She would sit on the floor at the feet of a rheumy old Kipchak soldier, arms gripped tight about her knees, as each deliciously bloody episode made her flinch and cower. Death came like a wind from the east. It blew men’s heads from their shoulders. Their skulls were like balls in a playground. Their bodies like tree trunks stacked in a forest” (p. 2; author's italics). This environment sets the tone for a female protagonist who differs from the typical historical fiction heroine in refreshing ways. No fake-tough heroine, she starts out adventurous and independent, strong-willed and unafraid, with a proud, un-neurotic attitude to the perks of royal rank. She will sneak out to watch a battle, take up hunting and fishing, wrestle would-be captors, and – a unique experience for a heroine in modern commercial fiction? – actually relishes the spectacle of a hunt that is really a competition based on mass-slaughter of animals. This unapologetic honesty and straightforwardness made her a treat to read, and I could hardly wait for her to come into her own on the throne. Bewilderingly, however, about halfway through The Girl King her personality and involvement in the plot wilt, and she ends up bereft of every trait that made her character unique and vibrant.

 

Instead it is Sos (Davit/David Soslan/i of Alania, north of Georgia) who inherits the part of the energetic doer, the protagonist at the centre of adventure, whereas Tamar’s character retreats into resignation in the face of unappetising destiny and assumes an unexpected passivity. Dictated by plot rather than character development, this jarring change is symptomatic of a larger problem. While The Girl King introduces the reader to an amazing historical character, the bare-bones narrative promises much more than it is ultimately able to deliver. Time and again the plot seems poised on the brink of exploding into exciting fireworks but invariably bated breath becomes a sigh as one waits in vain for the “big” story to develop.

 

At the same time it becomes clear that The Girl King is not the novel to turn to for any kind of insight into a mediaeval female personage in power. Here we have instead the folkloric image of a heroine whose quest to secure her queenship is a romantic adventure tale that gradually casts her as a conventional damsel in distress while the hero is assigned the juicy parts. This is an inevitable development because the author insists on keeping the story focus squarely on swashbuckling escapades even when that choice leads the narrative away from Tamar, who as queen is no longer able to enjoy the same physical freedom as before. With increasing frequency the amiable and perpetually adolescent Soslani seemed to take over the story entirely, causing me to reflect sombrely on the questionable relevance of the novel’s title. He is an instrumental historical figure (it is speculated that he may have been a distant blood relation of Tamar and some historians believe that Tamar’s aunt Rusudan served as tutor and patron to Soslani), but his impulsiveness, innocence, simplicity, and air of immaturity in the novel (he is said to be in his seventeenth spring in 1177, p. 14-5), where he never seems to graduate from boyhood into mature adulthood, prevented me from being able to reconcile his Peter Panesque traits with the man of exceptional qualities evidenced by the historical record.

 

Meanwhile, Tamar, whose ears and eyes have always been open in the past and who has armed herself with knowledge about the economy and trade of her country, is depicted as stoically resigned to obscurity, and certainly never seen exploiting her expertise – even though her financial acumen, political prowess, and religious and cultural patronage were the very weapons by which the historical Tamar was eventually able to defeat opposition and cement her rule. Her altered and difficult circumstances would certainly warrant changes in outlook and behaviour, but the problem is that her fierce, quick-witted, strategising personality has disappeared, replaced by a demure, accepting limpness. The minimal character development skips personal growth which would reveal evidence of the intellectual qualities and abilities that made her a legend in her own time. Tamar’s transition from ignored and bullied successor to commanding queen regnant is related through a series of simplistic episodes that note the change in the attitude of nobles and palace officials without credibly showing how and why. (Ordinary Georgians (Kartvelebi) are largely invisible in The Girl King, just like its heroine is barely seen thinking about her people and country – reminding me rather alarmingly of those regency romance dukes who spend no time in the House of Lords or administering their vast estates.) A pivotal scene pairs cardboard characterisation with a level of psychological credibility that might convince a 10-year old reader but made this adult cringe at the naïvety. I felt I was being fed the shakiest of skeletal drafts and, even in this age of notorious publishing shortcuts, was compelled to wonder what on earth happened to the editor. Compounding the decline, it is at this point that the author heavyhandedly inserts a ridiculous Woe-Is-Me-All-Is-Lost-Moment between the lovers and decides to alter the facts of major historical events. I lost what remained of my investment in the story, dragged myself through the last pages, and moved on to search for the real Tamar elsewhere.

 

Nevertheless, a few scenes with interesting (if ultimately under-used) narrative potential show promise for more complex character building in Clothier’s future writing. The contradictory forces in Tamar’s attitude to violence is a particularly intriguing aspect of her personality in view of her later reign (not covered in the novel). For all her admiration of blood-glory, for all her physical bravery and bemoaning that as a girl she can have no battle experience, for all that as queen she does not shrink from declaring war and riding out with her troops, when she actually does kill a character by her own hand she does so only out of charity. Her reaction to the punishment of enemies or traitors and the treatment of corpses for once presages the historical Tamar’s actions: a ban on the death penalty and torture. I would have loved to see an exploration of the beliefs, motives, and strong Christian faith that on one hand led her to show compassion to her personal enemies and on the other, having turned the tide of foreign aggression, made her relentlessly drive the expansion of Georgian borders and national influence. This is also, after all, the ruler who helped found the (so called) Empire of Trebizond and established Georgia’s military supremacy in Asia Minor.

 

The brevity of the novel’s page count, the sham chronology, and the love-adventure angle dispense with a host of questions and important historical details. Here are a few that nagged me. Did the Georgian nobles really revolt only because they resisted a female sovereign on principle and an opportunist saw his chance to seize the throne (Clothier’s version), or was it also an attempt to reclaim privileges lost under the tyrannical rule of Tamar’s father (whose own legal claim to the throne had previously been contested), and perhaps even a demand for a share in power (as seen in England some years later)? A circumstance disguised by Clothier’s twisting of chronology to make the sole threat appear to come from outside Georgia’s borders, turning her heroine and hero into rallying figures in a grand finale, is that the time of Tamar’s accession was certainly not the only occasion of insurgence against her. And for a reader interested in women’s history, the political influence of Tamar’s aunt Rusudan begs the question of the legal status of women in Georgian society not only in matters of inheritance but especially as pertains to governance and diplomacy. Why, for example, are the nobles in The Girl King willing to be guided by this woman if Tamar’s sex is the strongest objection they have to the legitimacy of her rule? Again, an issue which is never broached in the context of the novel’s culminating campaign is the impact of the Crusades on Georgia’s Muslim neighbours. It illustrates the over-simplification of the story but also leaves out any indication of the level of diplomatic engagement involved in Tamar’s future handling of relations with Muslim states and territories. For example, after Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem, Tamar sent envoys to the sultan, resulting in the restoration of Georgian possessions there and unique privileges for Georgian pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre. (See, for example, the reference in A History Of The Crusades: The Impact Of The Crusades In The Near East, by Setton, Zacour, and Hazard, University Of Wisconsin Press, 1985, p.88, and East And West In The Crusader States (Acta Of The Congress Held At Hernen Castle September 2000, vol. III) edited by K. Ciggaar and H. Teule, Peeters Publishers, 2003, p. 37-9.) Finally, the novel’s exclusive emphasis on the grittier and bloodier aspects of life in late twelfth-century Georgia easily gives the impression that the country was a cultural backwater, whereas, as noted earlier in this post, this was an era of major advances in science and art. It seems worth recalling that the Bagratids' association with the Imperial court at Constantinople ensured regular contact with the most cosmopolitan centre in Europe (for example, a century earlier, Maria of Alania, daughter of King Bagrat IV of Georgia, had married the Roman Emperor Michael VII; and the wife of Andronikos I or his son is also presumed to have been a Georgian princess, a possibility on which Clothier’s plot capitalises), and that Tamar’s economic and political ambitions brought even closer Georgian interaction than before with the Frankish and Muslim cultures of Outremer.

 

History in a work of historical fiction is, however, more than the sum of its historical facts and depth. Do the issues I have brought forward mean that Clothier’s novel fails to fulfill arguably the foremost criterion of (commercial) historical fiction: that of immersing the reader in another time and place? No. History in The Girl King may be thin and fantasy-imbued but there is a dinstinctiveness to the setting that creates an authentic atmosphere. It is seen, for example, in the co-existence of old local beliefs and Christian faith that keep characters respectful of the pagan spirit world they accept alongside Church teachings.

 

Another likeable aspect is the enthusiasm of the storytelling. The prose does fumble a bit uncertainly between simple and overwritten, and the jejune dialogue too often states the obvious. But there is a rough energy about the story that at least in the beginning trumps the awkward style of a first-time novelist. Clothier’s voice has a robust personality and there is something unadorned and honest about her language that is appealingly fresh and adds colour to the setting. At times I fancied hearing faint echoes of chansons de geste but the treatment of the subject-matter overwhelmingly harks back to classic boys’ adventure books.

 

And that brings me to the issue of the target audience for the The Girl King. Tales of growing up are found in literature for all ages, but an author who neglects to settle on an appropriate mode of presentation impairs the reader’s ability to engage and connect with a novel. Although neither the cover nor the imprint classify The Girl King as such, this is really a Young Adult-type book. I say “type” because the treatment of its coming-of-age themes seesaws between a style that sometimes seems too youthful even for older teens and several (if brief) scenes of brutality that would not be out of place in a laddish sort of adult historical adventure fiction. Coupled with a few inclusions of sexual innuendo and marital bedroom politics that contrast with the adolescent tone of the story and its lack of depth, the ultimate result is, audience-wise, a mess.

 

Since The Girl King is a work of fiction one cannot fault the author for the absence of a reading list or other recommendations for further information. A map and a concise historical note regarding liberties taken with factual events are appended. Nonetheless, in the case of an intriguing subject that is probably not well known to Clothier’s English-language audience – in the United Kingdom and North America the names most often associated with Georgia seem to be Stalin and Khachaturian – some pointers to resources besides The Knight (Man) In The Panther’s (Tiger's) Skin would have been useful. (Clothier includes the author, Shota Rustaveli, of this celebrated epic poem among her secondary characters, although in the novel his role as treasurer excludes anything but the coyest of hints to his subsequent literary fame).

 

I have spent much space outlining what this novel is not, perhaps because I am puzzled by the author’s intentions. Presumably she wished to bring attention to a historical figure deserving of wider international recognition. Indeed, enabling readers to discover Tamar may be the single most gratifying thing about The Girl King; she belongs not only alongside mediaeval female sovereigns such as Isabella of Castile, Urraca, Empress Matilda, and Queen Melisende of Jerusalem, but in any general survey of mediaeval rulership in Western Eurasia. Meg Clothier’s choice of what to tell, though, risks making Tamar’s story sound mundane – a somewhat adventurous yet many-times told everyday reality for mediaeval women of high rank. The book’s storyline re-writes history even as it declines to move beyond the obvious headlines and explore what made Tamar’s queenship extraordinary and the period she lived in an exceptional era in Georgian history. That is a missed opportunity, to say the least: if the life of Tamar is worth a novelisation, then surely it is worth more than this cursory glimpse. But as making such choices is a fiction writer’s prerogative, execution becomes all-important. Unfortunately, despite an arresting voice the actual storytelling is raw and at times painfully juvenile, suffering from inadequate revision, inconsistent, paltry characterisation, and haziness about its target audience. All things considered, The Girl King is passable historical fiction, an uneven debut by a writer who has not quite yet learnt to harness her talents but whose enthusiasm for her story shines through. With the novelty of such a setting, it may be enough for many readers, particularly those whose enjoyment of light, romantic historical fiction intersects with YA themes.

 

* The novel’s title makes creative use of the Georgian language: “Georgian knows no distinction of genders; accordingly, Thamar as a reigning sovereign was entitled mep'e (that is, king or queen regnant). This has sometimes been erroneously interpreted by modern historians as her having been proclaimed a 'king'.”

** Tamar is believed to have been born around 1160 (her parents married circa 1155). The precise records of her birth and death (1207/1210/13) as well as her burial place have been lost due to wars and invasions over the centuries. In calendars of Orthodox saints her birthdate is given as 1166, which, going by the childishness of Tamar's character in the first part of the novel, seems the year Clothier has decided to adopt.

 

Excerpt

(Century, a Random House imprint, 2011, p. 57):

"The horse wound down through the storm bed, until the ground levelled out and the way widened. The sun was not yet ready to show itself, but night was vanishing fast, the darkness evaporating, nothingness disappearing into nothing, leaving the strange colourless non-light that shrouds the world before dawn.

The Kart plain opened up before them, the grass bowing low before the light easterly wind that sprang up with the day. They climbed down and let the horse rest while they watched the sun race free, turning the land brown and green, colouring their faces pink and gold.

Tamar's hair wandered over her eyes. Her lower lip was sun-blistered. Her hand went to her shoulder, she reddened and her eyebrows bunched together, a little furrow in her forehead.

'Why?'

Sos grinned. 'Because I could. Because I wanted to.' His smile faded a little. 'And because of Aton.'

'I'll make them pay for that. For Albina too.'

His lips twitched. 'You. A girl?'

So he'd worked that out.

'Yes, me,' she nodded firmly. 'With help from my father.'

'Is he a rich man? Powerful? Would I know him from court?'

It was Tamar's turn to smile.

'I am sure of it. I am Tamar. You have saved the King's daughter.'"

 

Books of related interest: Royal Imagery In Medieval Georgia by Anthony Eastmond studies “the relationship between art and power” in the kingdom over several centuries, focussing on Queen Tamar (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). New Constantines: The Rhythm of Imperial Renewal in Byzantium, 4th-13th Centuries (Papers from the Twenty-Sixth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Scotland, 1992), edited by Paul Magdalino contains the essay “Royal Renewal In Georgia: The Case Of Queen Tamar”, also by Anthony Eastmond. Again, Eastmond contributed the essay “Gender And Orientalism In Georgia In The Age Of Queen Tamar” in Women, Men, And Eunuchs: Gender In Byzantium, edited by Elizabeth James (Routledge, 1997), where he “looks at the idea of the female king and how gender affected the construction of kingship both in medieval Georgia and in the perceptions of that rule in later centuries” (p. XIX). A frequently cited general work that covers this period is History Of The Georgian Nation by Kalistrat Salia, translated by Katharine Vivian (1983), whereas Historical Dictionary Of Georgia by Alexander Mikaberidze (Scarecrow Press, 2007) contains "a chronology, glossary, introduction, appendixes, maps, bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on important persons, places, events, and institutions and significant political, economic, social, and cultural aspects".

 

This is my fifth entry in the Historical Fiction Challenge.

 

Italy: The Midwife Of Venice by Roberta Rich

Roberta Rich’s debut historical novel, The Midwife of Venice, is a page turner. Whether that is an unquestionable merit depends on the preferences of the reader. The narrative has the quality of a folk-tale quest in that the series of seemingly insurmountable obstacles thrown in the paths of the underdog heroine and hero are invariably overcome by the same through cleverness and luck. In the last two-thirds the narrative never stops to catch its breath, and anti-Semitism, death, and slavery become a blur against the race-against-time of the separated couple to puzzle out the next challenge so they can be re-united. Still, absorbing details of sixteenth-century midwifery abound, the descriptions of life in Venice and Malta are savoury, the plot is mildly suspenseful, and the characters engaging. The Midwife Of Venice is a simpler story than its trappings suggest, but its warm-hearted energy gives it a rosy glow.

 

1575. The reputation of Hannah Levi as a midwife of outstanding skill leads to a midnight call for help from an unexpected source. The Contessa di Padovani is in labour and hovering between life and death, and Hannah is the Conte’s last hope for delivering an heir and, if possible, saving his wife. The request is illegal, however: as a Jew, Hannah is forbidden, on pain of torture and death, to administer medical treatment to Christians. But the reward the Conte offers is too consequential to dismiss: enough money to ransom Hannah’s husband, who has been captured and sold into slavery.

Isaac Levi’s lost his life savings when mercenaries in the service of the Knights of Malta attacked his ship and put him on the auction block. The inhospitable island of Malta offers few options for survival, and every day he manages to stay alive only pushes him closer to becoming a galley slave, a brutal fate that means certain death.

When greed and prejudice intervene, threatening the lives of not only Isaac and Hannah but the entire Jewish population of the Ghetto of Venice, desperate measures are required.

 

Three days after finishing The Midwife Of Venice I am having difficulty recollecting the details of the story. I bought the book purely on the basis of its settings and Jewish characters, having only a dim impression of the plot. The novel turned out to be popular historical fiction of the spare but atmospheric type, with an unfussy plot and plenty of suspenseful hooks and cliffhanger chapter endings that encourage speed-reading at the expense of reflection. I found it to be the fiction equivalent of chocolate, and while I enjoyed the book while it lasted I am now a little regretful that so many of the calories I consumed proved empty.

 

On the positive side, The Midwife Of Venice fulfills the first criterion of historical fiction: to transport the reader to another time and place. The story develops out the setting with deceptive effortlessness, fresh and believable at the same time. The senses are excited by sights and smells and textures as the author possesses a flair for conjuring up the physical surroundings inhabited by her characters with robust, deft strokes: the greasy waters and slimy steps of the canals, the sound of the Maltese dialect – “all spongy vowels and harsh fricatives”; the exertion of hauling a cart you are harnessed to in place of a draught animal when you are weak from starvation. The conflict between Jewish and Christian practices and beliefs round out a full and convincing portrayal of Renaissance midwifery, and Hannah and Isaac movingly embody the fears and vulnerability of Jewish protagonists in a Christian world where the two groups are essentially strangers to each other, and where the superstitions of the period exacerbate dark suspicions about each other’s race and religion.

 

It is a climate of otherness and repression that breeds dangers from one’s own people almost as easily as from traditional enemies. When Hannah chooses love and compassion over law and safety, the cost of the consequences becomes at once different and steeper than anything she could have foreseen. It is here that I most missed the depth and substance that could have turned a good story into an outstanding one, in this painful intersection of individual morals versus responsibility toward the common good, and personal faith versus religious and secular law. Fear and suffering and violence swirl heavily around Hannah, but she seems, if not unconcerned, then remarkably unscathed by their weight except on the level of pounding pulses, aching hearts, and sweaty palms. Her ability to get herself quickly out of jams means she is never truly on her knees, never actually trapped at the mercy of forces beyond her control. While that makes for brisk storytelling, it also diminishes the emotional impact and softens what historically would have posed an acute, overpowering menace into a cozy sort of suspense where the nice guys trump evil as a matter of course. A case in point is the resolution. A principal character is presented with an unexpected fait accompli which s/he accepts and even welcomes without protest, discussion, or concern, making a narratively slack ending woefully simplistic.

 

Warning: end spoiler

After finishing the novel I went to the author’s website and found out that she is writing a sequel. Had I known about this when I began The Midwife Of Venice, it would have removed the remaining edge of real tension and shaped my view of the story into a simple puzzler about exactly how Hannah and Isaac are going to meet again. While I now know that the book is being branded as a thriller, and the mood of the first chapters of the book inclined in that direction, I have to say that the tension, despite elements that should be chilling, evaporates into adventure instead of tightening into psychological suspense.

End of spoiler

While dual storylines simultaneously follow Hannah in Venice and Isaac in Malta (with some differences in timelines), the strong contrast between the increasingly risk-filled adventures of the former and the latter’s preoccupation with the basic necessities of food and refuge means that the Maltese sections form a steadying background rhythm to the dramatic urgency of the Venitian chapters. After first being jarred by this split I gradually began to perceive it as enlivening. The stony, bleached landscape of sun-baked Malta complements the earthy language and dry humour as well as the straightforward problems and uncomplicated world view of the characters there. The elegance and grace of Venice but also its more sophisticated, insidious perils are reflected in the lifestyle of the wealthy (and stereotypical) Padovanis and the secrets, threats, and intrigues that assail Hannah from every quarter when she steals out from the night-time confines of the Ghetto Nuovo (Gheto Novo). Socially as well as physically, Venice is more fully realised than Malta, which, while getting my vote for vigorously-drawn secondary characters, is represented by dusty, nameless streets and simple, ordinary people; don’t expect the Knights to stride onto the page or to get a tour of Valletta, for example. Plotwise, their enforced separation and drastically changed circumstances prepare Isaac and Hannah for the possibility of other changes in their lives, although this growth process is outlined rather than explored.

 

A prominent plot element is predicated on the invention of obstetric forceps (pdf) or birthing spoons, as they are named in The Midwife Of Venice. Although the Chamberlen family (pdf) of doctors/male-midwives are usually credited with the invention of the modern obstetric forceps (or the rediscovery of a forgotten tool) sometime in the seventeenth century, the author suggests that the notion that Venitian midwives in this period may have used a similar birthing aid is not beyond the realm of possibility. I am inclined to agree. Islamic medicine was familiar with the use of forceps in difficult deliveries already before the tenth century, when Abul Qasim Khalaf ibn al-Abbas al-Zahrawi (Albucasis/Abulcasis) wrote his famous textbook of surgery. While these types of tongs may have been employed to pull out a dead fetus as were, it is believed, the tools illustrated in a 1554 Western tome by Jacob Rueff, why should not skilled and intelligent and pro-actively-minded midwives have considered alternative ways to reach or turn a badly positioned baby? Why should they have believed to a woman that God would condemn the manufacturing of a tool to assist them in their life-assisting trade?

 

The other point of history the plot induced me to ponder is a trifling matter unless one is interested in the geography and political relationships of the Mediterranean at this time. The year is 1575 and the author sends two Venitian-owned (this is explicitly stated) ships from Venice toward the Ottoman Empire. The first ship is Isaac’s and is attacked by mercenaries in the pay of the Knights of Malta, who drag their captives and loot back to their island. Fair enough: the Knights roamed the Mediterranean waters as privateers, and slave-trading was a profitable enterprise for everyone in the area, including the Venetians. But the second ship is destined for Constantinople yet makes a scheduled call at Malta to replenish provisions. Despite the story’s assurance that Malta was the victualling port every long-distance Mediterranean ship visited, I am doubtful. It seemed to me a case of contorting facts to suit various plot purposes. Not only is Malta out of the way, but the island of Crete, or Kingdom of Candia as it was known at this time, lies along the direct route, was the prosperous and acknowledged gate to the Eastern Mediterranean, possessed an excellent harbour (present Heraklion) and, most importantly of all, was ruled by Venice. (See, for example, Geography, Technology, And War: Studies in the maritime history of the Mediterranean, 649-1571 by John H. Pryor and Catholic pirates and Greek merchants: a maritime history of the Mediterranean by Molly Greene.) Travelling on board that second Venitian ship, furthermore, are at least one wealthy Ottoman family. I suppose it is feasible that they would not have chosen an Ottoman-owned ship, but in my mind kept playing the knowledge of the destructive Ottoman siege of Malta a decade earlier, and the Fourth Ottoman-Venetian War (a costly peace was negotiated in 1573, only two years before our story starts). There is no mention of discomfort or tension or even the slightest awareness of these hostilities, which went well beyond the merely diplomatic and continued to erupt on and off far into the future. (The Ottomans wrested Crete from the Venetians in the next century.)

 

An aspect of The Midwife Of Venice I wholeheartedly appreciated is that its characters are fictional. I enjoy the broader scope for the imagination and the unpredictability of events it allows for when compared to the restrictions imposed on the accounts of lusty love lives of queens, kings, and nobility that have hijacked the current historical fiction market. Very rarely do the latter offer insights or satisfactions for the person interested in the study of history that cannot be found and more intricately explored in scholarly works of non-fiction. Of course there are exceptions, and splendidly accomplished ones at that, which flesh out and fill in gaps and speculate with possibilities in the most gripping manner, but on the whole, unless one gains most of one’s knowledge and understanding of history from novels, it is the fictional characters who are free to surprise and take the reader to previously unvisited, unpredictable places and shed light on neglected subjects.

 

I enjoyed The Midwife Of Venice. It is an absorbing, breezy debut from a gifted storyteller whose assured handle on what makes popular fiction compelling will, I hope, develop into books with more mature (or at least less impatient!) narratives. Meanwhile, I am going to clear shelf space for Roberta Rich’s next historical yarn. I am, clearly, a chocoholic.

 

A note on the cover art, since my edition does not name the paintings: The upper picture is a detail of Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s painting, (Study) Head of a Woman. The colour of the scarf appears to have been manipulated to reflect the red headdresses Jews were required to wear by law. The lower picture is a painting of the Rialto Bridge on the Grand Canal; it looks like a Canaletto that has been altered.

 

Books of related interest: While it was fun looking up these reference works, some of which I plan to familiarise myself with, please note that I have only browsed through them haphazardly at the time of writing this. A Time To Be Born: Customs and Folklore of Jewish Birth by Michele Klein “draws upon a wide range of Jewish sources, from folk remedies and tales to biblical and mystical literature and reference works, to portray childbirth within a Jewish context”. Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology by Helen King examines “a range of different uses of the [Gynaeciorum libri, a compendium of ancient and contemporary texts on gynaecology, first published in 1566] in the history of medicine from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century”. The Court Midwife by Justine Siegemund (1636-1705) – a “spokesperson for the art of midwifery at a time when most obstetrical texts were written by men” – edited and translated from German by Lynne Tatlock, “contains descriptions of obstetric techniques of midwifery and its attendant social pressures”. The Art of Midwifery: early modern midwives in Europe by Hilary Marland, “[draws] on a vast range of archival material from six countries, [showing] the diversity in midwives' practices, competence, socio-economic background and education, as well as their public function and image”before the nineteenth century; it includes a chapter on midwifery in seventeenth-century Italy by Nadia Maria Filippini. And for an exploration of the history of the obstetric forceps, try The Obstetrician's Armamentarium : Historic Obstetric Instruments and Their Inventors by Bryan Hibbard.

The Ghetto Of Venice by Ricardo Calimani and The Ghetto on the Lagoon: A Guide to the History and Art of the Venetian Ghetto by Umberto Fortis, translated by Roberto Matteoda look like sound introductions to the topic. In The Jews Of Early Modern Venice, edited by Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid, various “specialists from many fields of Jewish studies provide an introduction to the history of the ghetto of Venice and up-to-date scholarship on the subject from the perspectives of various disciplines—including political, economic, women's, institutional, social and cultural history, religious studies, and musicology”; its main focus is on the early sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries, “when Jewish life in the city was at its most vigorous”. The Midwife of Venice touches only fleetingly on Jewish conversion to Christianity, but as Brian Pullan’s The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice: 1550-1670 notes, “Venice in the 16th and 17th centuries was on the frontier between Christianity and Judaism, being one of the principal points of departure from Europe to the Levant, and of re-entry from the Ottoman Empire.” The book may help shed clearer light on why the risk taken by both Hannah and the comital couple was so extremely dangerous, through his examination of “the social and political purpose of the Inquisition: its composition, procedures and legal entitlement to judge Jews. He explains the origins of the new Christians of Portugal and the neophytes of Italy, and describes those Christians who, though having no Jewish ancestry, nevertheless were attracted - at some risk to themselves - by the doctrines and customs of Judaism”.

Working Women of Early Modern Venice by Monica Chojnacka, attempts to show that “many [working women] headed households and even owned their own homes; when necessary, they also took in and supported other women of their families. Some were self-employed, while others had jobs outside the home. They often moved freely about the city to conduct business, and they took legal action in the courts on their own behalf. On a daily basis, Venetian women worked, traveled, and contested obstacles in ways that made the city their own”.

Last but not least, a list of reference works for further reading is included at the back of the Doubleday Canada 2011 trade paperback edition of The Midwife Of Venice.

This is my fourth entry in the Historical Fiction Challenge.