Alan Moore's "Jerusalem": Book Review

Renowned for his graphic narratives, Alan Moore creates this massive work of prose fiction, rivaling War and Peace in length and Ulysses in ambition. While not his first novel, it continues themes begun two decades ago in Voice of the Fire. In twelve deft chapters, Fire dramatized the evolution, in dazzling linguistic and intricate historical terms, of Moore's native Northampton. Jerusalem inflates this setting even as it narrows it down to a few blocks of the once-bustling Boroughs, which exist in a "simultaneous eternity" as developers build and then tear down this English city's core. Its working class dwellers find not an afterlife so much as a recurring existence, within a "trans-temporal chess game."

Defying the span of a brief review or facile summation, Alan Moore's evocation of his hometown sustains the meticulous composition of his graphic excursions. Lacking the brevity of a speech bubble or the compact limits of a comic-book format, Jerusalem challenges any reader's attention. Heady passages unfurl, as many of those taken up into the elevated realm of Mansoul, towering over the Boroughs (yet less apparent to those below still living) enter under the influence of Bedlam Jennies or Puck's Hats, fungal concoctions inviting comparisons to "eating fairies," amid a paranormal panorama of undines, Salamanders, and an Ultraduct. Those in this vortex may travel, in one case surpassing H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, to witness beyond "the death of day." Moore's inventive powers accelerate here, but they might bewilder, especially in the middle sections of this triple-decker tale which is a Victorian trope renewed. Rather than faltering, pressing on unveils to one’s mind many wonders.

Facing this other-world, two intermarried families comprise the central characters which Mansoul invites or repels. The Warrens arrive first. Siblings artist Alma and laborer Mick introduce us, via the largely omniscient narrator's voice, to their scrappy surroundings, after demolition of its imperial-era landmarks. Jerusalem then ambles back a century and a half, when Ern worked on London's St. Paul's. Mick, Alma and Ern receive eerie revelations from angels and Builders. Moore gradually reveals the reason for these ancient architects, and he populates the story-line with more Warrens and Vernells, who also have their own close encounters with those who hover about Mansoul. Named after John Bunyan's {Pilgrim's Progress}, "it was the very seat of war." Here, clashes summon demons.

Mansoul, made of "congealed dreams and memories," stands for Moore's version of space-time itself. "Think of your life as being like a book, a solid thing where the last line's already written while you're starting the first page. Your consciousness progresses through the narrative from its beginning to its end, and you become caught up in the illusion of events unfolding and time going by as these things are experienced by the characters within the drama." This scene's shifty teller boasts a lineage back to the apocryphal Book of Tobit. He tells Mick, swept up on a memorable "Sam O'Day ride" through the dark and the light as "an astral toddler," how "life and death" work, with admirable if surprising clarity. 

Sam continues: "In reality, however, all the words that shape the tale are fixed upon the page, the pages bound in their unvarying order." In the mind of their reader, progress occurs, but this remains an illusion. Instead, the book of life can be read over and over. So, every day "and every deed's eternal." Sam urges on his transported charge a motto Moore shares: "Live them in such a way that you can bear to live with them eternally."  Jerusalem, for Moore, represents more than his fantastic plot. It stands for a credo, one that in our world refusing conventional belief may survive past piety or doubt.

For, as an eighth-century monk learns, when he tries to center Northampton at the exact crossroads of England, hauling a stone from the real Jerusalem all the way to St. Gregory's Church, mysticism can tempt earthly calculations and thwart clerical confidences. The uncanny interactions the Warrens and the Vernells endure closer to the present (having taken ten years for Moore to write, most of this action stops in 2006) echo. A freed slave from America, the son of immigrants from post-war Sierra Leone, Ern's demented son, Buffalo Bill, Oliver Cromwell, the author of "Amazing Grace" and the members of the band Bauhaus fill the parade of figures who pass through or set up home as mortals in Northampton. What connects them, surmises Moore, is a gothic, altered, visionary sense. 

Their exchanges upend conventions. Moore favors his own detached telling more than the chronologically faithful linguistic ventriloquism of dialects and vocabularies that kindled Voice of the Fire, but some chapters in this one-volume trilogy adapt their own styles. Notably, a play starring Bunyan, the mad poet of nature John Clare, James Joyce's daughter and psychiatric patient Lucia, her friend Samuel Beckett, St. Thomas Becket, a "half-caste woman" elsewhere appearing as Marla Stiles and a married couple stirring up the Warren-Vernell mix demonstrates Moore's knack. He creates a Beckettian drama even as he satirizes its content, improving on its form as he links it to local history. 

And, as with the analogy that other Sam shows, characters repeat and return throughout this unvarying book's order. It's not all gloom. Humor surfaces, whether poking fun at Alma's scarecrow appearance, the simply wrong name of Newlife granted a hideous corporate block, or an everyday night down the pub. Hapless Ben Parritt "looked round appraisingly at the establishment's half-dozen other clients, motionless upon their stools like ugly novelty-set chessmen, sidelined and morose."

Moore varies approaches, when he lets one character late on burst into rhyme, or earlier when Lucia's monologue descends into a verbal morass of Finnegans Wake, fifty daunting pages mirroring the opening of Fire, when Moore reduced the consciousness of a Neolithic boy to 4000 stunted words. Here, Moore opens up rather than contracts his expressions; that contrast will weary some while exciting many. A reader may wish to pause, and let this epic find its rhythms within oneself. 

Moore never seems to flag in this telling. One part begins with Bob Goldman's gumshoe parody before settling into a more Moore-ish pace. But this may be an inevitable capitulation to the weight of the imaginative universe built here that threatens to crush any single inhabitant's utterances or ego. 

In this gigantic production, Moore avoids cliché, he regales us with a local chronicle demanding immersion into its erudition and he plays fairly with expectations. How this new Jerusalem ends will be discovered by the dogged, but the conclusion, circling back to the invitation offered Mick by Alma, satisfies and stuns. Having announced retirement from the graphic arena, in this printed spectacle, Moore dazzles. (Amazon US 9-13-16)

Paul Strohm's "Chaucer's Tale": Book Review

A "microbiography" of the poet's pivotal year of 1386, Chaucer's Tale reconstructs his situation as he entered a mid-life crisis. Enjoying a rent-free lease on a dank but well-situated residence at London's Aldgate portal, benefiting from a position in Parliament, and supported by a salary as a customs controller, in his early forties, Geoffrey Chaucer would seem to have it made. Depending on noble patronage and royal preferment, this up-and-coming civil servant-turned-insider at court found himself on the outs. On the losing side, he retreated to Kent and then crafted his tales of Canterbury. Forced retirement compelled him to reinvent himself.

Paul Strohm, a retired professor from Oxford and from Columbia, enlivens the London where Chaucer was born and raised. Nearly nothing is known of his literary career from the records extant, but much is about his work for the Crown. From the hints scattered or imagined in his verse, scholars construct a parallel life in private to that of the public man who worked his way into favor, slowly.

His stony, damp cell above the key position of Aldgate in the northeast corner of the old city stands as a "symbol of his entire London experience: rather blatantly public in some respects, yet quite private and defended in others". Chaucer's intense activity contrasts with his withdrawal and retreat from the hubbub. He occupies the intersection between the urban fortified wall and the busy road into the countryside. Strohm sets Chaucer's day within hearing of church bells, from dawn to midnight at Holy Trinity Priory, near his residence. Strohm reminds us of Chaucer's placement near this pattern of liturgical time, daily followed by the monks, and of his affinity for the seasonal cycle of pilgrimage and of devotion, coinciding with the natural rhythm of springtime which opens his tales memorably.

This narrative moves back and forth in Chaucer's lifetime somewhat, to fill in the back story. In 1374, Chaucer's appointment as controller of wool customs put him into a much loftier role than that title may convey to modern audiences. The wool trade dominated English commerce as its "only significant export item". Chaucer's complicity with corrupt merchants and bureaucrats to skim off the profits was expected by his betters, if implicitly. For, his wife's brother-in-law was John of Gaunt, who had ruled as regent, being Richard II's uncle. This had its advantages, but these could prove fickle. Chaucer depended on those higher up for the favors they dispensed and as a commoner he had to accept as he moved up the career ladder more than one "constrained choice", in Strohm's phrase.

Strohm pursues clues in the archives, and digs deep into material that may appear tangential. This may weary some readers, but he uses this data to suggest that Chaucer was not tempted by any great chicanery during his customs watch. Strohm avers Chaucer laid low as London's power elite colluded to enrich themselves from the wool tariffs pocketed and from the bribes exacted from tradesmen. Chaucer did not own land. He had been set up in a safe seat as a "yes man" for King Richard II.

This necessitated Chaucer's withdrawal from the customs post. He was recently estranged from his wife. He had to vacate Aldgate, for his single term in Parliament as a "shire knight" lacking property but representing nearby Kent. This office depended on Chaucer as a loyal backer of John of Gaunt and of the Ricardian factions, but from the time Chaucer entered Parliament through 1389, discontent grew. A majority in government resented the king's control by a few courtiers. Strohm interprets this hostile course of events as shoving aside Chaucer. He prudently absented himself from London during the next two years; some of his former allies turned malcontents were executed by Richard II.

Throughout this intrigue, Strohm tries to keep the tone in tune with us. He uses the phrase "living large", he compares the Parliament's politicians in session back then to those on expense accounts at bars in Pimlico or the Beltway, he nods to the attractions of the Las Vegas strip, and he offers an analogy to Hemingway's novella about the great marlin. These asides do not jar as much as one might expect. The liveliest sections, about Aldgate and about the making of the Canterbury Tales, rush by rapidly. More on Chaucer's most famous work would have been welcome, but Strohm's end notes point to his fellow scholars who have contributed much to our understanding of this story-cycle. After all, Strohm has set himself the difficult task of setting up the assembly of the tales, not their contents themselves. Meanwhile, he reminds readers of its fine predecessor, Troilus and Criseyde.

With "no fixed job and insignificant income", Chaucer decided on not a political but a literary "riposte" to his fall from favor. "Chaucer in 1386 was eminently fame-worthy...but certainly not famous yet." Strohm shows how his forced relocation and his separation from his urban audience sparked innovation. Eager to expand his reputation, Chaucer's hidden rivalry with Italian tale-teller Boccaccio spurred the Englishman to write in his native language its first lengthy masterpiece. Strohm regards the tales as a catalyst for an "audience of his own invention" as varied storytellers became characters, emerging to share a mixture of genres and styles, high and low registers, serious and comic narratives. In Strohm's version, Chaucer had to leave London and his comfortable sinecures. By doing so, and starting all over as a writer bent on making his reputation, he attained fame after all. This account reminds us of the impact Chaucer had, by choosing our own language.
(PopMatters 2-16-15; Amazon US 2-20-15)

Paul Kingsnorth's "The Wake": Book Review

Schoolchildren, in a more Anglocentric era, used to know "1066 and all that." While fewer today may remember that year and the momentous Norman Conquest, Paul Kingsnorth retells once-familiar tales of that invasion and two years of its devastating aftermath, through the speech of Buccmaster.

In a postscript, the author explains why he chose a "shadow tongue." Kingsnorth defines his invention of an Old English counterpart that he employs, without capitalization and with a modified orthography faithful to etymology, as "a pseudo-language intended to convey the feeling of the old language by combining some of its vocabulary and syntax with the English we speak today." The results slow any reader down. Even with my knowledge of Anglo-Saxon, I found this prose forced me to halt my pace. You cannot skim this. Therefore, the writer's bold decision to force us into an alien mindset succeeds. If you enter a few chapters deep into this novel, you hear and think and feel akin to the farmers and churls who found their language, their loyalty, and their land wrenched away.

This disorientation features cleverly, through a theme pushed aside from chronicles or textbooks.  Buccmaster follows the ways of the old gods, before Christ. As a comet flies overhead in 1066, a harbinger of doom for King Harold and the Saxons, Buccmaster rejects what "is a raedel for dumb folc" for "the bocs and the preosts the bells the laws of the crist it is not lic they sae." He believes, but in the denigrated Wayland the Smith, the World-Tree of Norse lore, and the "eald" forces of nature.

He rejects "this god from a land of dust where there is no night" as a foreign import, imposed by Rome and then by the forces who bless the "bastard" William of Normandy in his assault upon England. Buccmaster, a proud landowner if, as he reminds us and his listeners constantly, of but "three oxgangs," holds in contempt those who oppose his defiance of the Church and of the new Crown. We hear events as he and his villagers do, first as rumors from afar. He knows his fate will be subsumed to that of his fellow English, but he fears weakness. For 1066 is a "year will be lic no other in the lifs of all men in this land." For Buccmaster of Holland, in Lincolnshire's fens, senses doom.

Kingsnorth's saga follows the reaction to double threats to Harold's reign. As Buccmaster's two sons are called to join the English "fyrd" of conscripts to fight a Norse rival for the throne, the narrator sees his wife "frettan lic a moth who cannot reach the bright mona through wattle." Dreams, voices, visions begin to trouble Buccmaster. Soon, a tale-teller arrives in the hamlet to announce: "geeyome has cum in scips from the frenc and all is gan." All is gone. William's scorched earth policy follows.

With the imposition of Norman rule grim tidings dominate. Buccmaster and a few followers flee to the woods for safety. They long to "becum grene lic the leafs and the grass who lifs lic the fox and the wolf who is wilde lic the hafoc and the crow with teeth what tears from the enemi small bite and small bite until all the meat is gan." (There is a glossary for some of the more elusive terms appended.) This passage shows Kingsnorth's skill at transcribing speech and thought in an innovative manner. Reading this version of English, its roots emerge and remain vivid throughout The Wake.

Being a founder of the ecological Dark Mountain Project, Paul Kingsnorth displays keen sensitivity to the natural realm that the "grene men" seek to inhabit. Norman plunder, rape, murder, and the brutality that any war incites, by cavalry or by guerrillas, make this a sobering account of resistance to colonial and papal power. Contemporary resonance to this campaign resonates, even as the author wisely keeps this within the disconcertingly pastoral settings of Lincoln and the forests around fens.

Their furtive actions will stretch on too long, as the two years of Buccmaster's maneuvers and stops wear down his small band and the reader. But this is the cost of verisimilitude, for any campaign is given over to languor, doubt, and boredom rather than rousing derring-do. As Norman fortresses rise over the garrisoned towns, "thralls mac the castel to mac them selves thralls." Kingsnorth reminds us in his afterword how 70% of Britain today remains in the hands of 1%, and he wonders how this unequal distribution of land and wealth has compromised the fortunes of his homeland ever since.

Two real-life episodes, of the rebel Hereward the Wake and the kidnapped Bishop Turold, frame this novel. But the emphasis rests with the defiant men and bloodied women in the margins. Those who watched these events linger, still anonymous after a millennium. Their tongue was torn out and grafted to French manners, Their Saxon gods capitulated. But in The Wake, their words fought on.
(New York Journal of Books, 10-8-15)

R.H. Tawney's "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism": Book Review

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The phrase “Protestant work ethic” may have been invented by German sociologist Max Weber over a century ago, but economic historian R. H. Tawney (1880-1962) adapted it to British culture before and after the Reformation. In his 1926 book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Tawney, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, surveys late medieval and early modern justifications that reconciled a pious livelihood with financial gains.

Catholic teachings narrowed the scope of one’s earthly ambitions, according to God’s plan: “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Bound by morality, this medieval influence continued into the 16th and 17th centuries. Despite the Reformation, profits allowed for the merchant or worker remained narrow and constrained by doctrine. Yet this restraint withered within the post-Reformation momentum unleashing individual ambition.

Tawney crafts vivid images throughout his book to enrich its style. “Into commerce, industry and agriculture, the revolution in prices … injected a virus of hitherto unsuspected potency, at once a stimulant to feverish enterprise and an acid dissolving away all customary relationships.” As both a scholar and Christian Socialist activist, Tawney here echoes Marx, who in The Communist Manifesto noted the frenzied and fearful rush of capitalist growth following feudalism during this transformed era.

By the time of the Puritans, a shift away from Christian social teaching regarding usury and cupidity occurred. Tawney credits this to increasing lay involvement against the clerics of the Church of England. Puritan and Dissenter factions, who resented ministerial needling, instigated a lay revolt.

The Anglicans lost their royal role “as an independent standard of values,” and Puritans helped overthrow King Charles I in the English Civil War. This populist revolt weakened hidebound aspersions against the benefits of monetary accrual. Traditions reinforcing hierarchical relationships between the laity, clergy and rulers gave way to mercantile expansion and invention. Puritans elevated the value of hard labor and honest enterprise, if judiciously and ethically pursued, to further the service of God himself.

“Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more curious than the naive psychology of the business man,” Tawney observes, “who ascribes his achievements to his unaided efforts, in bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose continuous support and vigilant protection he would be as a lamb bleating in the desert.” Modern readers may find his prose musty, but Tawney’s donnish tone sparkles with moral power. He analyzes the learned arguments of centuries past and never hesitates to add his own views.
 
Before the Industrial Revolution, Tawney concludes, the spiritual and the economic spheres reversed. Perhaps this turnabout was necessary to enable the British to break out of a stodgy mindset. The clerical control of free enterprise that dominated the previous centuries was weakened, and the rise of the individual worker and the power corporate culture combined to push the Church aside. While preachers continued to castigate the evils of avarice and greed, their lay congregants increasingly minded their own business. Whatever discipline that Christian teachings had exerted was torn away by the modernizing impulse to enrich one’s self — and one’s investors. It was reasoned that a businessman’s success might well demonstrate God’s reward for energy and wise investments, no matter that the clergy counseled frugality, modesty and self-effacement. The British thus compartmentalized faith from profit.

The new Verso edition is reprinted from a 1938 Pelican Books imprint and does not offer any editorial updates. It reproduces Tawney’s 1937 preface in which he critiques Max Weber’s theory, but lacks any attempt to place the work in a modern context. This is an unfortunate oversight in an age when clashes over the role of religion within morality and the economy are as relevant as ever, a time when Pope Francis addresses Congress and the United Nations. (Spectrum Culture 10-2-15)

Donald R. Howard's "Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World": Book Review

This provides one of the liveliest narratives on medieval times that I can recall; the added bonus that a leading Chaucerian wrote this just before his death in 1987 adds poignancy, given the final line of the text proper contemplates eternity. Donald R. Howard navigates the difficult path between speaking to his fellow scholars and welcoming a wider audience into the author's works, life, and times. He does this with verve; he shows what Chaucer would have seen and what he did read and where he did travel. He reminds us of how far Chaucer roamed, even if he was a bookworm who preferred staying in London.

The challenge, as Howard admits, is that facts for the Middle Ages are few, and liable to change. For much of this, Howard has to reason on probabilities. For instance, I consulted this wanting more on Dante and Boccaccio, given as a grad school prof (himself a medievalist) asserted Chaucer was likely the first person in England to read the Commedia, as he knew Italian so as to make his diplomatic visit there. Howard supplements this fact with supposition--Chaucer may have met Boccaccio, may have had a quarrel with him, may have therefore not cited him by name in his later literary works, may have rubbed a man twice his age the wrong way. This is all intriguing, but as Howard might have admitted, he has had to fill out much of the bare bones of Chaucer's record with such insights, and so the book turns more a depiction of Chaucer's world and works than his life, and this does fill the book. It is more readable, but it does have to make tangents.

It does, however, with insight. As Howard presented the pilgrim's perspective well in earlier studies, so here. He shows how the mental map of a traveler inverted, so a vague Earthly Paradise atop the half of the sphere named Asia beckoned, whereas Jerusalem was at the center, and bisecting the other half are Europe on the left, and then near the Devil's sinister hand, and Africa on the other quarter. He adds that the Southern Hemisphere was debated as possible back then, and that Columbus did not think any more than many then that the earth was flat. So, in a few pages, Howard corrects crucial ideas many have about medieval lore. He aligns his pitch at both scholars and everyday readers.

This tone sustains the interest that keeps the pace moving along. Howard has to compress a lot about the Canterbury Tales into the latter parts, the sections many may want expanded. Howard's previous The Idea of the Canterbury Tales book may be recommended as is his shorter one on pilgrimage as more in-depth on crucial topics. What provides this book's verve and infuses its pages is Howard's fascination with Chaucer and his time and influences, and now, as fewer turn to this author and his works for pleasure or even for coursework, this biography merits your time and your immersion.
(Amazon US 10-14-14)

Ronald Hutton's "Pagan Britain": Book Review

This expert on past and present paganism revisits this topic, revising his 1991 survey of practices in the ancient British Isles to narrow it to Great Britain. He peers back thousands of years at rituals, monuments, and remains to surmise how people sought to connect with the sacred and the natural. Those two force-fields mingled in intricate ways, many of which may elude their stony, bony, material traces. Ronald Hutton, Professor of History at Bristol University, conveys an immense amount of scholarship in a cautious but lively manner. As with his previous books, he combines graceful prose with an awareness of the dangers of reducing this perplexing topic to romantic, lurid, or airy phrases.

Not that this factual compendium turns stodgy. While any serious presentation of such material means dry stretches will intervene, Hutton keeps a brisk pace. Endnotes pack a lot of references for scholars to pursue, but Hutton keeps his narrative academic yet accessible. The evidence being very limited for both prehistoric and early historic Britain, constraints emerge as scholars compete to advance their interpretations. Hutton shows readers frequently how current attitudes towards religion, immigration, feminism, and imperialism warp various theories applied to the archeological record, and how such an endeavor draws in diverse fields, so that scholars wind up discussing and debating across their typical divides.

Sometimes, bewilderment or enchantment seeps through Hutton's diligent recitals of digs and finds. Paleolithic images at Creswell Crags include in his captions "d) Shapes taken by some to be dancing women, and by others to be long-necked birds. e) So-called 'vulva' figures -- female genitalia or animal tracks, or something else altogether." These remind me of Borges' sly lists of Chinese marvels.

At Langdale Pikes, a remote Neolithic "factory" for stone in Cumbria's Lake District, Hutton allows us to glimpse the material and the spiritual as they blend. "The climb to the site is still long and hard, and anyone who makes it enters a world where wisps of clouds still drift along the surface of the land, and silence is usually absolute save for the voices of the wind and of thunder, and where pieces of rock, broken by frost or storm, come loose from their places and roll crashing down from the slopes of scree. It is a place where the majesty of stone is most evident, united with that of the heavens themselves." Such excursions are rare in this book, but necessary, for we view through a professor's eye the measured vision, in steady narration, the awe that accompanies so much analysis.

Stones shape into megaliths, dolmens, patterns. These by the New Stone Age after around 3000 BCE challenge conjectures that they paid homage to a Great Goddess, or that they stood for farmers who conquered hunters, or that they marked boundaries of sacred spaces and/or armed fortresses. Hutton weighs various arguments, but leans towards ambiguity. Often, the closer the evidence gets to the present-day technologies applied to interpret the traces, the less secure the previous theories become.

Even if much has vanished, the stones remain in henges and circles. So do hints of timber-circles and in tombs in turn, the slow pace of many millennia can be sensed. Systems may have been embedded very long in the British archipelago. The average Orkney Islands burial shrine held but eleven bodies over thirty to fifty generations, indicating those interred there must have been particularly favored. Avebury's stone henge was assembled over a thousand years; a Saxon-era village now surrounds it.

This antiquity attests to the wonder with which earlier Britons regarded these monuments. Its most famous site reveals prehistoric burials nearby by visitors from the Continent, marking its long fame. Stonehenge has been mythologized for at least the past nine centuries in writing, and it functions "as a mirror in which modern people can reflect and justify their own prejudices, ideals and expectations". For instance, the two most recent interpretations of Stonehenge neatly contradict each other. One proposes it as a place of magical stones and healing. The other regards it as a stony necropolis, balanced by a nearby gathering place which by its timber affirmed the powers of life.

For the next period, those doughty classifications of short, dark Neolithic inhabitants invaded by what archeologists termed on account of their imported pottery the Beaker People, and then tall, fair Celts who swept in from the Continent, meet their dismantling. Instead, genetic evidence traces trade across the North Atlantic and beyond, when smaller waves of immigrants--then as now--arrived to exchange goods, mate, and settle down with the islanders. Barrows with burials of bodies and bling faded as a warrior elite grew, and as their artifacts and cremated urns gained prestige in cemeteries.

These shifts cause some to attribute them to new beliefs, brought perhaps along with the new imports. Britain chilled, from its South of France ambiance, into Scandinavian levels of cold before resuming what is closer to today's weather. What emerged as its new set of "ritual practitioners" sparks dissent. Hutton in previous books has analyzed paganism then and now, and this Druid cult past and present.

He sums up these studies and balances them fairly against the counter-cultural champions of "avant-garde spirituality". Ley lines, astro-archeology, and earth mysteries emerge in the past few decades as the fringe battles the mainstream, and as science and magic square off in the press. Hutton explains that professors rarely rush to defend their archeological turf, as they face derision if correct and dismissal if their findings fail (as they will) to please those who ally with "poetic truth" instead. However, as his endnotes evoke, he graciously thanks many among these ranks for their contributions to widening the scope of scholarship, to take in sounds, colors, lines of sight, and mythic resonances.

Throughout Pagan Britain, Hutton places his own work within these "power politics of knowledge in the modern age" nimbly. He manages to reach out to mavericks whom most scholars ignore, while he advances mainstream scholarship. As an historian, he may be well placed, being slightly outside the archeological camp but trained in the analytical methods his own field shares, while being a fellow traveler who reports from the ranks of British iconoclasts, the unifying theme of his career's pursuit.

By late prehistory, whatever the former neat divisions of Bronze and Iron Ages now give way to, the ripples of the power that will be Rome enter Britain, perhaps as early as 400 BCE. While Julius Caesar will not land in Britannia to report on Druids until 55 BCE, goods and culture earlier shift far to the north of the Empire, as it comes closer. Outmoded conceptions of Celts as a triple threat of art, languages, and "race" as Hutton explains now adjust to a proto-European Union model, where whatever the continental peoples were before Rome, they seem to have possessed some common cultural elements to loosely unite many diverse nations. These presences, when excavated from land or water, may by a sensational media gain notoriety if the bodies of early Britons preserved in bogs as "Druid priests" or human sacrifices. Hutton knows too well the dangers of promoting sagas as fact. As with chalk figures still seen on hillsides, or Iron Age coinage, the evidence enduring creates its own problems of meaning, and figuring out what is sacred and what is secular eludes those who now try to decipher the "intractable nature" of evidence. But, one case cheered me as typical of this search.

Near my ancestral farmhouse, since the mid-1980s reverting to ruin in Ireland, stands what Hutton terms a "burnt mound" (fulacht fiadh in Irish eludes easy translation from "bloody-flesh spit for wild animals/deer"). These are found by the thousands across the archipelago, serving as the primitive equivalent of a hot tub. Professors long figured these were for heating stones to plop in to cook meat. Recently, some conjectured them as logically a place for not only feasting but, in damp weather, warming up in a sweat lodge tent; two scholars in Galway experimented with brewing barley ale via a modern mock-up. Hutton genially figures all three speculations, from evidence, meet his criteria. I dutifully add that a prosaic use has been posited, if less invigorating, just as necessary: doing laundry.

With the Romans, recognizable baths arrived, along with the historical record's advent. Yet debates over interpreting the depth of British adaptation of Roman ways continue over the evidence found of idols, inscriptions, and images from a presence that at its height numbered 55,000 troops and up to four times the amount of civilian support for that imperial occupation. Given headless corpses have been often interred, as Hutton shows, four plausible explanations can be conjectured for their presence. An image of a comely nude woman, escorted by two clad if somewhat stouter females, may be a Venus between two nymphs, or a Christian postulant readied for baptism by a pair of matrons. These examples testify to the difficulty of distinguishing native from Roman impacts on beliefs, a process accelerated in later centuries when Romanization had settled in enough to cause some to revert to a retro-paganism as Christianity began to rise, and later as legions withdrew from Britain.

This overlap between persisting Roman and nascent Christian practices, in a time of tumult during the fifth century, creates another difficult period for archeologists and historians to puzzle over. The records of what some would even then claim as the coming of dark ages reflect their Christian panic. All the same, two hundred years ensue in which the historical record, the economy, and the culture appear to have suffered dramatic cessation, as far as the British pagan legacy can be followed. For, while in the east a Germanic-Scandinavian paganism brought by invaders replaced it, this seems to have wiped out previous pagan practices. In the west of the island, descendants of the Roman colony adapted Christianity in its similarly Roman version, which appears to lack continuity with the Roman occupation, nevertheless. Discontinuity reigns: while the genetic and landscape evidence shows little sign of dramatic British change, the linguistic break from Latin and Celtic and the ethnic divisions persisting between Saxon and native run deep for many centuries after islanders convert to Christ.

While Arthurian fiction imagines shamans, wizards, and magic, Hutton remains firmly suspicious of any Anglo-Saxon presence for such "cunning men" persisting as pagan rather than as eventually Christian, and he repeats his research affirming the lack of any truly pagan practitioner of magic after the medieval acceptance of Christianity in Britain until the twentieth century, allowing for a few from inconclusive reports who may have been instead deluded or plain insane. Over a few centuries, the scattered redoubts of paganism surrendered to a relentless force. Pagan and Christian rulers fought over which petty or restive realm would be Christian or pagan; for a while, common people wavered back and forth, too. But while indigenous worship was rooted in the local, the Christian manifestation demanded elimination of any rivals, as "more aggressive, determined and monopolistic" a regime.

Yet, Hutton avers that medieval Christians conveyed four patterns that aligned with their pagan predecessors. Polytheism persisted by a cult of saints aligned to trades or holy wells, by a "provision of new figures who offered a parallel service". Ritual observances led to seasonal festivals, worship opened up spaces for female participation, and male priests kept presiding over sacrificial altars. But, there was no "continuing allegiance to the old deities in preference to Christ" even as rites, usages, ideas and festivals as "trace-elements" were absorbed into Christian and/or popular superstitions.

Herne the Hunter and Ceridwen as Mother Goddess appear, as "back-projections" of modern unease about progress or patriarchy, not pagan deities who have managed to elude 1500 years of Christian crackdown. Hutton examines the Green Man, sheela-na-gigs, labyrinths, hillside chalk giants, as he weighs this evidence for and against his position. Fair-minded but confident, Hutton strengthens his previous arguments which doubt what others have claimed when looking at these as manifestations of the pagan. These artifacts "echo" ancient images and practices, rather than confirm direct survivals.

In conclusion, four-hundred pages of this solidly presented, thoughtful narrative (given the sheer mass of material to sift through and present for both a scholarly and a mainstream audience, no small feat; my only regrets are too few maps and few typos) repeat a characteristic humility for this affable yet eminent scholar of paganism. This is a big book on a vast subject, presented intelligently. It reminds us of how quickly academic "proof" can shift, and the twenty-odd years since his 1991 study reveal how technology and our own mentalities filter into dim corners of the past. Hutton, shedding light into passage tombs, beheaded skeletons, and runic scratches, stays sober but spirited as he takes us through thousands of years of enigmatic, jumbled remains. While "The Quest for...." and "In Search of..." appeal to those who speculate as if ancient mysteries can be resolved at last, Dr. Hutton knows better. He reminds us of "how much we cannot know" as "an opportunity and a strength" rather than as an embarrassment or a hardship" when examining the "common resource" of evidence.
(5-5-14 Amazon US and to PopMatters

Alan Moore's "Voice of the Fire": Book Review

Shamans, heads, magic, a bridge, crossroads, dogs, pigs, flame: elemental and elusive, this powerful novel recapitulates the evolution of English and the growth of Northampton, Alan Moore's home city. Don't let the first chapter dissuade you. "Hob's Hog" may best Riddley Walker or the "Sloosha" chapter of Cloud Atlas, for Moore limits an adolescent boy's expression of a bewildering encounter with a "cunning-man" and his companion to four hundred words, these shattered and fragmented into Neolithic limitations, personal or linguistic+++. A wizard himself, Moore forces us into an altered state.

The narrator's mother dies. "Theys bits of bright is move out from she eyes and hang on trees." (17) The sun, hitting her eyes, fails to rouse her, and the boy realizes she is no more. More than once, we will follow a corpse pushed down into a grave, a body's bits looking back at us before they are tramped down and the dirt conquers the flesh. Yet, very late, Moore nods to and alters a notion of the Kabbalah, whereas we are God dispersed from the Big Bang into fragments, yearning for universal end to be reunited.

Twelve chapters recapitulate the progress supposed as paths turn into roads and roads into highways. A shifty young hustler in "The Cremation Fields" laments the new sky-gods who displace the earth-mother's worship. Yet, neither faith appears to ease the existential condition. As she justifies her own machinations: "If we in this world are cruel by harsh necessity, how much more wicked are the gods who want for nothing but torment us to the death?" (94) Exiled already ca. 2500 BCE, they "cook the blood from the earth and let it scab to crowns and daggers," as the world's energy already exhausts.

After "In the Drownings" post-AD 43 dramatizes the coming of the Romans from a fisherman's odd perspective, "The Head of Diocletian" post-290 introduces a foreigner's reaction. Sent by Rome to apprehend forgers of imperial coins, he sums up the culture clash and another decline: "There's few signs of the Empire to be seen out here, a scattering of villas where retired generals struggle to afford their mistresses." (140) Moore does not falter in creating recognizable characters for each of his dozen narrators. He stays poised, adjusting the tone to the manners and mentalities of the era.

By 1064, it's a jumble. Alfgiva, crippled beggar turned nun, morphs into martyred St. Ragener from 870 and then into a witness to a terrible emanation from the crypt of local St. Peter's in 1050. Jump to after the Conquest, where after 1100 the Church of the Holy Sepulchre rises roundly with emanations of the Templars and their fearsome rite once removed to a very different setting than the Crusades where Simon of Senlis encountered his own astonishing and similarly unnerving revelation.

Religion dominates the second millennium. The executions of Guy Fawkes and his Catholic conspirators in 1607 leaves one of the less fervent victims unconvinced of sectarian verities. He theorizes "that life is ordered by the principles of some religion so peculiar and obscure that it has no followers, and none may fathom it, nor know the rituals by which to court its favour." (197-8)

"Angel Language," its title a theme via magician John Dee filtered increasingly into the last third of Voice of the Fire, opens with six paragraphs from a judge in 1618 that rival Joyce's abilities. After crafting graphic fiction with its own restrictions placed on what an author may explore within its boundaries, this first novel enables Moore to stretch out. It may not please all, but it merits patience. It moves forward as our language does, into passages of beauty and terror. While this section for its neater patterning felt slightly schematic in its chiasmus, the echoes express confusion appropriately.

In 1705, one of the last two women. lovers and partners, sentenced to be burned as witches in the kingdom has her say. "We had our fun, and at the end of it they fetched us out and burned us both to dust. They had a stronger Magic. Though their books and words were lifeless, drear and not as pretty as our own, they had a greater heaviness, and so at last dragged us down. Our Art concerns all that may change or move in life, but with their endless writ they seek to make life still, that soon it shall be suffocated, crushed beneath their manuscripts. For my part, I would sooner have the Fire. At least it dances. Passion is not strange to it."*** (248)  Consider how this passage resounds with conviction, and clarity. Moore channels his intelligence into men and women we can understand, no matter their century, and he provides much to reflect upon about the clashes between nature, energy, and order.

As the voices overlap, and images such as blue beads, an odd beast, or the name of Eleanor repeat, the reader faces a commitment. Five years in the making, its detail convinces me. No chapter felt false. For those with less stamina for British minutiae via arcane lore, the concentration demanded by Moore to match his own scrutiny may weary. However, if you wish a bracing, and sometimes bewildering series of unreliable narrators beckoning you into the impossible conundrum of any author: how to escape the subjective when describing one's own reality--note an aside to Niels Bohr.

After a chapter on John Clare, the nature poet gone mad, recounted in suitably dispersed and chronologically scattered fashion, we move into the last century. Alfie Rouse's roguish testimony of his own manipulations updates that of the second chapter's scoundrel: how relationships--intimate or casual-- fall prey to greed and weakness exerted by the more scheming among us. But no teller escapes some sympathy. We learn of him in the Great War, and such an observation for its familiarity does not ring less true if from a returned veteran with a head wound, an calculating salesman and with an eye for the ladies: "Half those fellows in those trenches wouldn't be there if not for the way their girlfriends look at them when they're dressed up for war. Deny it if you can." (271)

Finally, it's Alan Moore, although he does not use the singular first person, but only appears as the author, in "Phipps' Fire Escape." He takes us around Northampton in 1995, a town with its mind "encased in concrete." Moore tries to align us with its hidden pulse. "The only constant factor in the local-interest photograph collections are the mounds of bricks, the cranes against the sky." (296) Barclayscard and Carlsberg loom as the present-day replacements for button factories, or those for shoes and boots. Debt and drink: the creations of his neighbors, as he witnesses municipal decay.

After so long with this novel, Moore's reluctance to let it go attenuates its last few pages. He reasons that "raising the dead to tell us what they know" (302) explains his endeavor. If you look at pp. 306-13 in passing they point you back to certain ideas, and Moore's mission: "Make the real a story and the story real, the portrait struggling to devour its sitter." (306) We all, he concludes, are caught in fiction. So, to me resurrecting the voice of Nelly Shaw the condemned witch, if not in magical or weighty analogies but cartographic terms: "Lacking any territory that is not subjective, we can only live upon the map. All that remains in question is which map we choose, whether we live in the world's insistent texts or else replace them with a stronger language of our own." {interview here}

One wishes every talented artist or writer had five years per project. Enhanced by Jose Villarubia's illustrations, appended so as to not distract but enrich the reading, the focus of this, so intense, may scare off the pale, but those tough-skinned enough to endure the plunge into fire and alphabets will find the brilliance of this memorable novel akin to heat itself, to comfort and to warn those who seek to come close to its flickers and smoke. Mirrors held by twelve men and women, we peer in. (Amazon US 8-10-13)+++Overwhelmed? Deciphering Hob's Hog Enticed?*** Moore's "Bog Venus"

Ag cur cuairt Cookham

Chuaigh Léna agus mé ar an traein go Paddington i Londain go dtí an baile Cookham ag imeall an abhainn Thames Dé Sathairn. Iarr muid a fheiceáil an áit a raibh cónái Stanley Spencer ar feadh ar shaol (1891-1959). Ar ndóigh, d'imigh sé go An Domhan Mór, cosúil le fír eile an oiread sin ansin.

Chónaic muid múrmhaisithe móra ag Teach Somerset an lá roimh inné. Mar sin, tá na pictiúr agus líníochtaí ina Dánlann Stanley Spencer níos mó faoi shaol laethúil. Ach, scrúdaigh Spencer an radharc Críostaí triu amharc mistiúl agus umhal, ina tstraide na Cookham féin leis a comharsanaí.

Is féidir leat a fheicéail go leor faoi Cookham ar líne. D'fhoglaim mé go raibh áit an-sean agus ro-stairiúl. Ciallaíon an t-ainm ar siúl "cwch-ium," mar sé "áit báid" i Chéilteach arsa.

Shiúl muid ag timpeall: go siopa tae, go Cora Olney, an eaglais meánaioseach, go bhruach na habainn Thames, An Póna agus móinteach, agus an stáisiún traenach. Thóg Spencer an traen laethúil ag a hocht go Londain a fhreastail An Scoil Slade agus d'fhill sé in am don tae. Bhí mac léinn gan íoc ansin, gan amhras.

Chaill muid an traen, ach bhí maith linn an baile. Gan fírinne, ba mhaith liom a fanacht ansin ar feadh tréimhse níos faide. Mar sin féin, bíonn straidbhaile dara is saibhre sa Bhreatain.

Visiting Cookham. 

Layne and I went by train from Paddington in London to the town of Cookham along the river Thames on Saturday. We wanted to see the place Stanley Spencer lived during his life (1891-1959). However, he went off to the Great War, as so many men of his time then.

We saw the great murals at Somerset House the day before yesterday. Therefore, the paintings and drawings in the Stanley Spencer Gallery are more about daily life. But, Spencer perceived a Christian view through a mystical and humble perspective, in the streets of Cookham itself with his neighbors.

You can see more about Cookham on line. I learned that it is a very old and quite historical place. The place name means "cwch-ium," that is "place of boats" in ancient Celtic.

We walked around: to the tea-shop, to Olney Weir, the medieval church, the banks of the river Thames, The Pound and moor, and the train station. Spencer took the train daily at eight to London to attend the Slade School and he returned in time for tea. He was an outstanding student there, without a doubt.

We missed the train, but we liked the town. Truly, I would like to stay there for a longer time. All the same, it's the second richest village in Britain.

(Píctiúr: Móintéan na Cookham/Cookham Moor, 1937)

Nicholas J. Higham + Martin J. Ryan's "The Anglo-Saxon World": Book Review

If you can read this sentence, you owe a debt to Anglo-Saxons. Much of our basic language, perhaps bits of our law, and likely some of your former if not present neighbors if you live in the English-speaking world perpetuated and augmented a social cohesion based upon early medieval foundations of their roots. The peoples who formed the English kingdom forged it first from the elite if intrusive identities of fifth-century Saxons, Angles, and Jutes who confronted the remnants of Romano-British culture.

Before the Angles and Saxons, Brittania did not attract much attention. Although it took a tenth of Rome's legions to occupy its contested realm, it did not supply much wealth. Career opportunities for its Celtic natives, as Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan tally them, proved limited: laborers, recruits for the military, slaves, and prostitutes. They begin their survey with an examination of Britain, as a fusion of Roman rule, adapted by native British peoples, characterized the first few centuries after its occupation in the middle of the first century C.E.  Dealing with a distant land, and increasingly beset by barbarian incursions, Rome did not sustain its dominance. Its power had faded from the island before the end of the fourth century, as the imperial legions gradually withdrew to defend the Western Empire, and the sea raiders surrounding the coasts of Britain had stormed in.

While Higham and Ryan, after paraphrasing recent research, remain hesitant to calculate how many Saxons, Angles, and Jutes left their German, Frisian, and Danish homes to settle in Britain, it appears a "high-prestige" contingent convinced or coerced the Romanized and indigenous lowland Britons to adapt Old English by the middle of the fifth century. Few words we speak in its modern descendent come from Celtic tongues, and this imbalance demonstrates the replacement of ancient languages by that new import as its popularity and status spread rapidly. A sort of "apartheid" may have accompanied this Germanic regime, so that those loyal to Celtic culture and leadership found themselves increasingly marginalized. The "wergild" or man-price value varied when restitution was sought in a violent society where invaders and resisters battled among themselves and against many occupiers: a Briton was worth half of the value of those who made the laws as Angles and Saxons.

Compounding this imposition, over the next two centuries, came Christianity. A Celtic version had endured if in a persecuted manner (as the invaders were pagan for a considerable if varying time initially) among some natives, but Saxons and Angles found that a revival of the Roman version (first introduced under later imperial occupation of Britain, intriguingly) suited martial rule and mental constructs well. Catholicism imported by missionaries from the former empire delivered clerical administration, militarized models, and continental learning. By 730, Britain had been Christianized, at least officially. As Beowulf shows, still puzzling scholars today, pagan elements lingered long.

For the Germanic peoples imposing control over fractious and divided Celtic kingdoms, the importance of family, lineage, and kindred enabled "kingship" (from the same root as "kin") to combine not only spatial advantage in territory conquered but tribal alliances negotiated to expand the dynasties of Northumbria, Mercia, Anglia, Kent, and the Saxon lands of Essex, Wessex, and Sussex. Eventually, seven kingdoms fought for dominance. Given the bloody conflicts against internal and foreign rivals, its rulers took a long time before settling on the name of England (the Latin on coinage as King Alfred craftily minted ca. 875 to call himself "rex anglorum" is an elusive phrase as it may mean king of the Angles or of the English, as they came to label themselves later). This review necessarily simplifies what "The Anglo-Saxon World" conveys in complicated chapters full of formidable names in many languages and what proves for dutiful stretches relentless strife.

This depth, compressed into density, may weigh down even a reader as fascinated by this era as this reviewer. Higham and Ryan present in nearly five hundred pages a necessarily thorough account, if one while accessibly written will be consulted more in history seminars than airport lounges. Given the scarcity of evidence for much of this period, the relative lack of social history, lively anecdotes, or everyday life as it was endured can exact demands on those looking for the past made popular, but the rather old-fashioned top-down dominant approach of names, dates, and reports does result in a trusted resource, open-ended and able to weigh and sift contested evidence.

The fact that it interprets specialist lore and scientific findings adds to its value. Its heft and generous inclusion of charts, maps, tables, and illustrations (many from archeological excavations, monuments, manuscripts, the engrossing Bayeux Tapestry, and especially coins--not sure if these depictions will be in color as I have a galley proof) will ease your learning curve; the authors supply a list of sources in a running series of endnotes, but they keep the text itself free of parenthetical citations or superscription, which lightens their academic tone.

What's admirable about this wide-ranging presentation? The asides as to how Anglo-Saxon terms and inventions echo down to us. For instance, shire-reeve incorporates the establishment of this territorial division with the man who patrolled it as a royal agent by the late tenth century, a "sheriff". And as for if not law or order, then their lack; certainly when the Vikings arrive ca. 800, the pace quickens.

The "St. Brice's Day Massacre" of November 13, 1002, may be unknown to gangland aficionados today, but it anticipates what any brutal leader who needed to crack down on his rivals and defend his turf might do. Aethelred, although denigrated in his own parlous reign as the "unready" (literally "ill-counseled" as this very term denotes linguistic shifts over a thousand years), endures as an English king determined to launch a pre-emptive strike against Danish mercenaries. After two centuries of Viking raids, then occupation, Aethelred (unlike some of his Germanic predecessors) tried to rally against the Scandinavian raiders--and their English allies, as warlords and collaborators.

When some Danes fled into St. Frideswide's Church in Oxford, the king ordered their sanctuary to be burnt down, and those within it. All over the realm, on royal command the Danes were slain, as digs over the past decade reveal. Carbon-dating and isotope analysis of skeletons now can pinpoint Scandinavian origins for the bones dug up from mass graves: many young men with multiple wounds not suffered in battle, decapitated, attacked from behind while prone, or hit in the back of the skull.

Emma, Aethelred's second wife, found herself willingly or wisely married off to his Danish successor, Cnut, who in 1016 took over England. Game of Thrones comes often to mind when reflecting on the internecine revenge and diplomatic contentions filling many paragraphs here. The hard bargain apparently driven by Emma herself hints at this sort of lively inspiration for tale tellers. 

The next year Cnut divided England among himself and three rivals, only to kill off one the same year, while eliminating three more leaders. Furthermore, consider the fate of Aethelred's sons and grandsons. "Eadwig, the son of Aethelred by his first consort Aelfgifu of York, was driven into exile in 1017 and killed soon afterwards, while Edward and Alfred, Aethelred's sons by Emma, went into exile in Normandy. Edmund Ironside's sons, Edward and Edmund, were likewise exiled to the Continent, ending up eventually in Hungary having escaped attempts by Cnut to have them murdered." One reflects upon the distance needed to flee to what was the edge of Europe, and a barbaric enclave itself, to elude vengeance of a Viking made uneasy king.

Unsurprisingly, the authors find Cnut's long reign intriguing; they trace the derivation of our meaning for "rich" to the OE "rice" which by this time melded the older meaning of "power" with the newer one of "wealth" to symbolize the fusion of the two for an ambitious set of social climbers. Among these was Cnut's favorite Godwine, who'd enter the jockeying for the throne after Cnut's death in 1035. No wonder both King Alfred and Harold II would stamp "pax" (Latin for "peace") on their coinage alongside their regal profiles: the Vikings kept pressing their advantages while the English fought or bought them off. The issue of succession defies brevity: the authors' chart of the English, Norwegian, and Danish claimants to or inheritors of the English crown, and the Norman dukes who would soon seize it, records nearly sixty progenitors, spouses, siblings, and/or descendants, with fifteen kings controlling some or all of England between the tenth and the twelfth centuries. 

The "some or all" proves the sticking point. Harold Godwineson's less than ten months as ruler found him driving back Norwegian invaders--then immediately hastening south to fend off William of Normandy, to an end every student used to know if no other date in English lore. 1066 represents the "biggest land grab" in the kingdom's history. Monasteries were given over to the newcomers; castles loomed over the angry inhabitants of besieged cities and insurgent borders. Heavy cavalry had won the Norman battle at Hastings; armed might bested the resistance put up by Harold's feebler allies.

The conclusion of this sprawling narrative may be less familiar that that preceding scene. Normans decimated those they hated as Saxons. England's elite rebelled repeatedly; William imposed a scorched-earth policy over much of the restive north of his vast but hostile kingdom. The peasants and villagers had nowhere to run. Far fewer in numbers than the fifth-century Anglo-Saxon elite who had conquered what they finally called England, the "barely one percent" of Normans swept in to take over the ninety-nine percent, its mixed peoples calling themselves now the English. The island's newest (and last successful) invaders first had settled down in France and turned from Viking Northmen into Normans. Then, emboldened to rush into an England under Scandinavian attack, and embittered by what they saw as Harold's unlawful taking of the crown against William's own claim, they killed, expelled, or drove off the ruling class among their Saxon predecessors. Ironically, many from this displaced English elite joined the Vikings as they continued in their raids--if elsewhere. (A 6-25-13; PopMatters 6-7-13)

Ag dul go Londain aríst, cuid amháin

D'imigh muid go Cathair na hÁingeal go dtí Londain an chéad Dé Máirt i mí na Nollaig luath. Fhág Léna agus mé le linn na h-óiche. Bhí Léna ansuid le linn samhraidh seo caite, ach ní raibh mé ansin ach uair amháin (nó níos lú!) sa deich mbliana chomh fásta: beagán i Meitheamh-Iúil 1979, 1989 agus 2003 mar i gcéanna.

D'fhán muid i gKensington Thios ina h-Óstán de Blacam. Is áit iontach, agus fuair muid úasghrádú chun seomra mór i stíl na Fraince. Bhí maith linn a léamh dhá nó trí nuachtán (íomlán ar an bháis na Mandela agus an triail na Nigella Lawson) áitiuilaí go brea gach maidin le bricfeasta ann, fós.

Thosaigh muid ár tseachtaine seisean féin Dé Ceadaoin leis cuairt go Músaem na Londain ag an balla Rómhánach. Tá sé ag dul chun cinn ó amannaí neoiliteach go Céilteach go Rómánach go meanaoiseach go nAthbheochana. Ansin, théann tú go síos go dtí an t-úrlar thíos a fheiceáil an ré nua-aimseartha dtí an lá inniu.

Chónaic mé ar léarscáil na Músaem na Ord Naomh Eoin. D'fhóglaim muid faoi na Ord i gclós an-stairiúl air i gClerkenwell ó meanaoiseach go anois mar sheirbhis otharchairr. Ith muid dinnéar Mharocó blasta i tStráide Grégis, Soho, ag Maison Touareg.

Ar deireadh, bhreatnaigh muid drámaíocht "Mojo" ag Amharclann Harold Pinter in aice leis Cearnach Leicester, iomlán de carnabhail geal. Bhí an-tuirseach, ar ndóigh. Ní raibh mé a thuiscint go leor de.

Going to London again, part one.

We went from Los Angeles to London early in December. Layne and I left during the night. Layne had been over there during this past summer, but I had not been there but once (or less!) decade as an adult: a bit in June-July 1979, the same 1989 and 2003.

We stayed in South Kensington at Blake's Hotel. It's a wonderful place, and we got an upgrade to a big room in French style. We liked reading two or three fine local newspapers at breakfast there, too.

We started our week itself on Wednesday with a visit to the London Museum at the Roman Wall. It goes from neolithic times to Celtic to Roman to medieval to the Renaissance. Then, you go down to the first floor to see the early modern times to the present.

I saw on a map The Museum of the Order of St. John. We learned about the Order in its very historic courtyard in Clerkenwell from medieval times to now as an ambulance service. We ate a tasty Moroccan dinner in Greek Street, Soho, at Maison Touareg.

Finally, we saw the drama "Mojo" at the Harold Pinter Theatre near Leicester Square, full of a bright carnival. I was very tired, however. I didn't understand much of it. (Grianghraf/Photo: St John's Gate at night/Geata Naomh Eoin i n-óiche)

John MacGregor's "Propinquity": Book Review

This takes place in Australia starting around forty years ago. Clive Lean relates nearly all of the story firsthand, yet his school chum Julian Lake's early portion comes via an omniscient narrative from the outback. John MacGregor conveys Clive's tale from an exuberant sensibility open to irony and levity. By contrast, Julian's snippet comes in a straightforward, unaffected tone: this does, however, make you wonder why this portion departed from the first-person perspective dominating Propinquity.

Originally published in 1986, it's now re-issued as an e-book by the author, who requested my review.  (There remain typos and misspellings; not sure if this is due to transfer to Kindle format or if they were in the printed edition. The author has reported to have revised the e-book since my review.) I liked Clive's schoolboy glimpses of countercultural fervor and political naivete; the author's own subsequent work to assist others abroad, his journalistic coverage of abuses in East Timor and among his homeland's politicians may be predicted from this novel. A lot of Australian-specific references that eluded me, but the general plot however uncanny remains clear.

Clive deals with the ups and downs of his father's garden equipment business while Julian wanders into a seeker's quest. Part two introduces Eustace Harkin, a WWII vet on the down and out, to Clive. A surprising transaction follows, enabling Clive to leave Australia to study medicine at Oxford. At Oxford, he falls in with friends (the Vishenkar group) who experiment with psychedelics. (Meanwhile, Gilberte, their classmate, is a bodyguard for the Italian president, unfortunately Aldo Moro; Alistair, another classmate is in Baby Doc's Haiti, during the era of contras and CIA blowback: their itineraries eventually intersect with the main plot neatly if a bit predictably.) In transit through London, Clive meets Sam Goode; her familial ties to the "Royal Peculiar" status of Westminster Abbey picked up (for me) the pace. This will be sustained by quite a memorable place for a tryst.

Berengaria, not a figure likely to ring any reader's bells, but Richard the Lionheart's peripatetic and bold queen from Navarre, comes to light in Sam's recital. Then, the novel unlocks the Abbey's secrets. Kabir, a Vedic teacher, Joseph of Arimathea, and Gnostics intertwine with Sam's "spellbinding" tale to Clive ca. 1200. The nature of fiction, as in real life, requires this emerges "as told to" in long conversations. (The Benedictine monks as far as I know were removed from the Abbey about forty years before 1599, but I am unsure if this date was shifted forward by MacGregor--or Sam--for the novel's own purposes.)

How students' medical expertise merges with medieval evidence merges in the book's second half. It moves as expected, an entertaining story mixed with a clever, erudite "what-if" premise. Given the dramatic findings, there's an understated tone of acceptance that either betrays the author's own attitude, or the characters' sangfroid in a chiller climate than Australia to the startling revelations. However, a madcap abduction later restores vigor, and earns "eleven minutes of national prime time." It ends in a modest resolution, open-ended while keeping the mysteries uncovered open to possibility.
(Amazon US 7-23-13; the author informs me the typos have been fixed since I read a review copy.)

Ian Mortimer's "The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England": Book Review

"It is not unusual to wake up in the middle of the night to the barking of dogs, the snoring of travelers in your chamber, and the unmistakable sounds of someone urinating or drunkenly vomiting from the stairs or gallery down into the yard." This sounds like a scene from a frathouse comedy, but it's Ian Mortimer conjuring up a stay at an inn, six hundred years ago.

"If an unchanging diet of boiled bacon, rye bread, and peas does not appeal, then consider yourself lucky not to be stuck in a house in which the bacon has not gone rancid, the flour has been eaten by rats, and the peas have become damp and rotted." So goes the summation of faring in the winter, when few tasty items can be imported or preserved. Mortimer, as in compelling chapters on the hazards of sea voyages, the predicament of hazarding roads, or making one's mucky way through darkened alleys, makes the smells and scenes come alive vividly. He gleans the best of what chroniclers and accountants have compiled, and as a trained medieval historian, he incorporates sources with diligence and an eye for the telling, vivid detail. He translates scholarship into a lively narrative.

With my own doctorate in medieval literature, I came to this curious how it'd inform me. I confess it taught me a lot. While the initial conceit of a Rough Guide for one transported back in time is not as sustained after a brisk start as I'd expected. No maps makes a lamentable lack, and while period illustrations are chosen well, they are in two middle color inserts. The publisher could have included maps and more b/w illustrations and charts; this would have improved the value. Still, while the chapters may veer about in tone and topic, the compilation of so much information and data rendered into richly described word pictures carries its own charm and its own compelling interest for those of us who are armchair visitors to the time of Chaucer, Piers Plowman, and the Black Plague.

There's fresh insight, as when Mortimer explains the Catch-22 of rape, pregnancy, and orgasm as (mis-)understood when applying Galen's ancient conceptions of the female sexual response to medieval legal interpretation and application, or when Mortimer accounts for why it was a good idea for any man never to leave one's house unarmed. He re-creates the rawness of the era, and how elusive were its refinements for many, although in a far less crowded landscape, perhaps even the poor could take in more beauty and certainly more quiet, as market towns held but a few thousand.

Movingly and compellingly, the few pages given over to the plague make the strongest impression. Mortimer asks us to imagine a child kissed to sleep one night, and then the next coughing up blood. The suddenness of death comes across vividly. He estimates about half of those living between 1330 and 1400 died of the plagues that ravaged England in waves, not only the Black Plague mid-century.

The chapter on law shows another strength. It's the clearest description I have found in a popular account of medieval legislation, justice, and how the laws were enforced or broken in the absence of a permanent police force, reliant more on tithe-men called to gather miscreants to bring to sheriffs, and the local pressures and corruption that ensued when justice was carried out in a place where few could go unnoticed. Mortimer stresses the unpredictability of life and death well throughout. The author sustains respect for those six hundred years ago, and reminds us how they were not as different from our own uneasy, uncertain selves as we may imagine. He lets us know what they saw, did, and, to a limited degree given the century's extant data and literacy, wrote and thought.

This closes with a poignant summary of the little left to us from what stories people told. John Gower, the Gawain poet, Piers Plowman, and especially Chaucer gain brief but adroit notice. Rightly, Mortimer concludes by urging us back to read Chaucer, and not only chronicles and roll-books but literature enlivens the contexts Mortimer presents to us efficiently and affectionately. (Amazon US 3-8-12)

Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall": Book Review

Deservedly a Booker Prize winner, this ambitious story conveys a novel of ideas as well as of (half-)familiar figures. It narrates an unlikely hero, a flawed protagonist, a conniving yet moral-minded man at the heart of the court of Henry the Eighth, as he plots to divorce Katherine of Aragon so as to marry Anne Boleyn. Many reviewers have emphasized Thomas Cromwell's role here as bitterly opposed to Thomas More, but Hilary Mantel presents both chancellors as equally obstinate in their convictions. To Cromwell, service and loyalty to his king coincide with his determination to free England from subservience to outmoded ritual and oppressive mindsets; Cromwell recognizes his master's flaws, but he remains faithful to his wishes, and as the king's fortunes increase, so do Cromwell's.

Along the way, we meet many of those who oppose the king's sexual and imperial desires. But Hilary Mantel refuses to caricature Mary Tudor, Katherine, those executed for their Catholic resistance, or the many figures forced to save their lives or their livelihoods as they choose between England and Rome, "the living against the dead" as Henry declares his realm as an empire freed from the Pope. She evokes sympathy with More's victims, those burned or disemboweled for their courage, and she shows how More himself expected more than what he gave those he persecuted and condemned when it came to final mercy. Yet she does not allow More in these pages to become a cartoon, and she carefully explores his own predicament, infuriating as More's refusals are to his foe Cromwell.

This material over five hundred complicated pages holds up astonishingly well. I had to consult the chart of the characters more than once (lots of Marys and Thomases) and Mantel integrates their complex fates, providing contexts-- if often very subtly-- to convey essential information: it all comes from the direct observation, hearsay or indirect reporting of Cromwell himself, a difficult feat to pull off smoothly for an audience so far distant from these tumultuous times, ones so often presented in cartoonish fashion or garbled summation. Technically, this requires patience on the reader's part, as Mantel chooses a perspective that doggedly must be followed, even if angles and distortions enter the vantage point of Cromwell's largely unruffled consciousness. My only reservation is that this exacting method in which the tale is told, via "he" as Cromwell, can be momentarily confusing in the passages when others enter in the same third-person; the movement from one male character to Cromwell and back can be very slight, and demands attention.

The humor and wit may be sparse but all the more welcome. In this era of the rise of individualism and humanism, ideas leap out, for this is a novel not only about characters and alliances and defiances, but about the slow arrival of early modern society. In 1530, Henry hears from Cromwell about the monks: "It cannot always be Lent. What I cannot stomach is hypocrisy, fraud, idleness--their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship, and their lack of invention. When did anything good last come from a monastery? They do not invent, they only repeat, and what they repeat is corrupt. For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don't like, and written one that is favorable to Rome." (180) This has the force of eloquence, as spoken by a wise, fervent counselor to a monarch.

The shift in power later comes to mind as Cromwell humiliates a would-be suitor of Anne, Harry Percy: "The world is not run from where he thinks." Not the Scottish borders, let alone London, but from mercantile centers in Antwerp, Florence, even Lisbon. "Not from castle walls, but from countinghouses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot." (310) Cromwell's eye for details, of fabric from his past as a wool merchant, from his father's trade as a blacksmith, and from Cromwell's negotiations as soldier, businessman, and now diplomat infuse such moments.

Tension permeates this novel, as individual lives are sacrificed and a nation's direction waits upon the dictates of kings and popes, parliaments and supplicants. "The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower of rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh." (499)

"The king is good to those who think him good." (318) This barbed motto could serve as the theme for Cromwell's unsparing tone and the slogan for those who must remain under the service of their king, or who must oppose him to protect their Catholic, European, or personal interests. By 1535 as this novel ends, Cromwell is at his zenith even as Anne Boleyn begins to waver in her sex appeal to the king who has overturned Christendom in order to wed and bed her. Her marriage has not brought the male heir the king craves; meanwhile we see Elizabeth as "the ginger pig in the cradle," bristly haired and angry.

Staring down a doomed More, Cromwell in the disgraced statesman's cell notes how even in summer, More has drawn the shades, as his books have been taken away. "A handful of hail smacks itself against the window. It startles them both; he gets up, restless. He would rather know what's outside, see the summer in its sad wreckage, than cower behind the blind and wonder what the damage is." (519) More represents the overturned realm of the past, full of obesiance to papism and suppression of thought; Cromwell for all his faults seeks to illuminate the possibility of a freer world where a Bible in English may be read, ideas considered without imprisonment, and where people begin to learn to think for themselves.

Still, Cromwell ends this novel in his own limitations, even as he is to follow the king away from London, the day of More's execution. Cromwell will seek out the Seymours who live at Wolf Hall; their daughter Jane has caught Cromwell's eye as a lady-in-waiting in the Boleyn employ. That episode and the next five years, it is to be hoped, will provide a sequel as Cromwell himself learns the vagaries and passing fancies of the monarch whom he seeks to please. (Posted to Amazon US 12-23-10 & Lunch.com 2-20-11)

David Jones' "Friars' Tales": Book Review

Chaucer's conniving Pardoner and crafty friars may linger longer in memory, but real-life counterparts of those who preached sermons and promoted indulgences have long been relegated to manuscripts. The last quarter-century has produced more accessible, if still pricy and academic, studies of how sermons worked to convince their audiences, and how clerics organized their contents. Jones, with an affordable, accessible small volume, offers today's audience a chance to read what their ancestors may have heard eight centuries ago.


He annotates brisk, fluid translations of the two earliest known British Isles collections of exempla, illustrative stories that preachers used to grab the attention of their congregants. Relentlessly moral, these hard-sell tales also allow us to glimpse what sustained a listener--who likely had little to no literacy if a layperson--as to what beliefs and attitudes of popular culture survived in towns and on farms away from the quill-penned parchment. These two collections originated in the late thirteenth century. An edition of the first, the Latin anthology Liber Exemplorum, was edited by A.G. Little in 1908; it was organized by an English Franciscan friar, who later worked in Ireland, trained in Paris alongside his famous confrere Roger Bacon.

Unfortunately, the 213 exempla contained in this Franciscan manuscript represent probably just over half of what was intended-- we only have the first volume that ends with "M" in alphabetical order of its thematic contents. (The original survives in one copy, now at Durham Cathedral.) Still, the value of this anthology remains, for an eighth of the stories can be found in no other source that we know of. This friar adds useful asides to his fellow friars, commanded to spread the Word with careful words, as the lively stories interspersed might offend or scandalize or tempt the laity-- for clerics, more candor is allowed them as insiders into the difficulties within the cloister. 

Viewing what captured the ears of audiences in medieval Ireland and Britain reminds us of what techniques endure in rhetoric and advertising today. Listeners constantly are assured by names, places, and "I heard this from so-and-so who witnessed it in the presence of this-and-that..." of the veracity of the miracles, sins, visions, and dangers which assailed the deluded, the vain, and the unwary. Sermons are meant to convince the Catholic of the efficacy of the sacraments, the mechanisms of hell and purgatory, indulgences, and Masses that constituted late-medieval Church teaching, and to stimulate constant repentance. Countless miscreants delay confession in these vignettes only to choke, writhe, and collapse before a priest can be found to shrive them. 

Therefore, the impression of urgency upon the listener to act now, a mainstay of salesmanship, endures. The friars charged with evangelizing the everyday folks who flocked to their sermons were enjoined to do so by the necessity of this task to save souls, and the practicality of continuing an intricate economy which sustained their own Orders and their own upkeep. Their listeners had to attend Mass, but they also might come upon friars as they held forth at festivals, markets, and frequent feast days. Throughout the Franciscan's collection, reminders to the clergy are given on how to modify, emphasize, or rework a story so as to stick in the minds of their impressionable audiences. Jones in his introduction notes how these sermons "indicate what preachers thought a congregation might find plausible, and they therefore constitute an important source for the mentalités of the past." 

Scholar Alan E. Bernstein is quoted by Jones as to how exempla demonstrate a "clerical calculation of popular concerns," and how preachers had to keep their credibility about the most astonishing reports shared. The Franciscan author notes more than once his own presence at the recital of amazing stories, or vouches for them as seen or heard or endured by others. By such referrals to authority, appeals to truth prove convincing.


For instance, one example elaborating the impact of prayer comes from the very village where his own father lives, he relates. A clerk named John tramped out in the middle of the night to visit his concubine. (The friar knows them both.) As the errant clerk sneaked out to his lover's neighboring village, a large dog loomed. The dog whirls around and challenges him in English: "Give me your sword!" The clerk refuses, gripping the weapon while defying his adversary, replying "still more fiercely in English, 'You lie, by the death of Christ!'" The articulate enemy is shown then to be the devil in canine disguise. But the beast disappears instantly to attest to the power of prayer--even when by a sinner Christ's name is invoked. 



The accompanying collection now in the British Library, by a Dominican friar based likely at Cambridge, fills its contents with similar tales. Even if Jones eschews comment on the differences in tone or emphases between the two manuscripts as literature, the latter anthology to me appears slightly more elevated in style, if equally dense in everyday name-date-fact stolidly arrayed to prove that the fantastic contents are not fevered fiction.


Jones selects fifty-two of its 315 stories. These are less helpfully arranged than the Franciscan edition, which itself by contrast reveals valuable insight into the nature of how such material could be packaged for users. The Dominican does not intersperse advice about the adaptation of the stories but lets them follow one another without comment or headings. About forty percent of its contents expound upon dogmatic matters, and the rest treat of sins and vices. 


One example, the last exemplum included, tells of a Norwich bailiff--a profession proverbially treated along with lawyers as avaricious, rapacious, and cruel. It conveys this slight shift in style. The "still hard-hearted bailiff" dies, and his son asks how he fares above, or below. His father replies: "The Son of God denied me and took me up most harshly and placed me at the centre of His wheel, where the axle of a cart or wagon is always turning, where there is never any rest but always toil and travail while the cart is drawn by animals." The careful phrasing, the extended syntax, and the humiliating nature of the haughty bailiff's punishment all illustrate the use of a typical image and inclusion of dialogue to drive home the moral of a typical tale. 


This book, intended for seminars on medieval religion and popular culture, may benefit also any reader eager to find out more about how men and women once may have conceived their world and the next world. Jones in his introduction explains the contexts for sermonizing and for the imperative upon priests to educate the unlettered and the common folk as well as their fellow clergy, depending on the adaptation of the contents. Finally, an up-to-date bibliography allows scholars to learn still more about the wide range of themes and applications employed by those who incorporated sermons and stories into their own efforts to save souls.
(Posted to New York Journal of Books 5-11-11.)