Julian by Gore Vidal

When you are born into greatness, you may be forgiven for exhibiting a sense of destiny or an assumption of purpose. When you also find yourself marginalised, you may also be praised for a decision to pursue philosophy and learning alongside religious purity. When the celebrity that is your birthright also suggests that others might prefer you dead, you might be excused for wanting to keep your head down. But then you were born into greatness and had no choice in the matter. Your head is permanently above the parapet. 

 Gore Vidal’s masterpiece of historical fiction works on every level. The Roman emperor Julian is his subject. The novel charts Julian’s origins and early years in the eastern part of the late Roman Empire. He thinks of himself as Greek, never really masters Latin and never willingly expresses himself in it. Neither is he one of those new-fangled Galilean types who espouse a new religion with three gods. No, Julian is a traditionalist, though not because of a propensity for conservatism, but more because the tried and tested has worked for centuries, continues to do so and, crucially, reveals itself to him. Like his own pedigree, the old religion has an identity and record all its own and, alongside that, proven power. He takes this stand despite the habit of conversion, manifest in Constantine’s adoption of the new faith, running in the family. Julian’s form - in the sense of literary form – works with remarkable success and consistency. It is presented as his own journal, jottings toward an intended autobiography. 

But these notes have been pored over by two readers, Libanius and Priscus, both of whom the emperor has known since childhood. Since they are both also teachers, philosophers and advisers, their marginal comments are themselves interesting, enlightening and definitely not to be trusted. The book, thus, is a linear progression through a life, something akin to an autobiography in note form. It describes Julian’s early formation and education in detail and his almost Masonic adoption into the old religion. It captures beautifully how pragmatism must rule, despite the necessity of being faithful to ideology. It relates with great skill how greatness can be thrust upon even a willing recipient, be accepted, and yet be no more than a manifestation of cynical pragmatism. So when Julian is summoned to the status of Caesar, we see immediately that power prefers him on the inside projecting minimally outwards, rather than outside and potentially polluting. 

His changed status warrants a posting to Gaul to clear up the mess left by others less competent, a hospital pass if ever there was one. But Julian astounds all. He succeeds. He has the Midas touch. Everything goes his way and his pragmatism marries itself to opportunism to generate a populist mongrel that fights better, schemes more ruthlessly and thus wins. What it never does, however, is forget its origins. Throughout it remains frugal, thrifty and to the point, the greatness thrust upon it is reinvested towards achieving a greater, but ever-receding glory. Gore Vidal’s Julian thus raises its subject to Augustan status and follows the new leader to the east where he engages Persia and dreams of conquering India. Is this Alexander reborn? What the book does not do – thankfully – is offer detailed descriptions of military matters, since Julian himself has already written on these things elsewhere. This neat ploy keeps the focus of the book on the man, not his exploits. Late sections are in note form only, since the emperor was engaged with his day job of attempted world domination. As historical fiction, 

Julian has it all. It recreates a feeling of the places. It relives decisions and options in a thoroughly convincing way. It fleshes out events with credible, fallible people, despite their occasional god status. Above all, it takes you there. View the book on amazon Julian

The Knot Of Vipers by Francois Mauriac

When you reckon your time is up and that you’d like to get a few things straight before you peg out, the temptation to take up a pen and use it as a weapon might become all-consuming. Louis does precisely this, and thus the text of Francois Mauriac’s novel, The Knot Of Vipers, comes alive. Louis is well-heeled. He has made millions from his business interests over the years. But, realising he can’t take any of it with him, he considers how best to dispose of his fortune and, at the same time, analyses various aspects of the relationships that have filled his life. 

He finds all of them wanting in one way or another. He might be accused of a lack of both optimism and charity! So Louis pens a letter, a novel-length letter addressed to his wife. It’s to be his final statement and his way of putting the record straight, perhaps also a means of exacting retribution. He has been married to Isa for many years. Their marriage has been good in the Catholic sense, but their bed has been a cool, reverential place for some time, rather than a seat of reverie. 

The wife is the husband’s prime target. He recalls her lack of conviction, her inability to respond to him. An entire marriage relived becomes a jumble of opinions, recollections, threats and judgments, many of them petty, but all heartfelt. Louis particularly recalls his wife’s description of an episode with another man. He conveniently ignores a fling of his own. There was a much-loved daughter called Marie. But for all kinds of reasons she is not going to inherit. How annoying it is when you want to wield the dagger and find the job already done! 

So who else might Louis drag down with his pen? Well, there’s his son, naturally, and also a natural son. The former is Hubert, and his personal qualities rarely approach the old man’s professed standards. The latter, Robert, remains meek and unassuming. He’ll do all right! At least he won’t be plotting his father’s downfall! And so The Knot Of Vipers tightens itself around its own complications. Even lifetimes of highly profitable devotion produce complicated, internecine rivalries that have to be given space to dissipate. And, in Louis’s family, where even the obvious can be denied to preserve public face, what has not been expressed over the years just creates new layers of complication, layers that crowd out any negotiable space. 

I found on occasions that the scenario gave way under the weight of what had to be described. A private letter to a wife does not need descriptions of mutual acquaintances. The reader might demand this, but shared experience would only need an occasional reference. This, however, is The Knot Of Vipers only weakness. It’s a real tour de force of the concept that families f*** you up, especially Catholic ones, especially uncommunicative ones, especially… And then, of course, the book ends. View the book on amazon The Knot of Vipers (Capuchin Classics)

A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene

Monsieur Querry never reveals his Christian name. Perhaps it’s because he doesn’t want to admit his Christianity. Perhaps he possesses it, but resists it. Perhaps... Monsieur Querry is the central character in Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case. The novel examines the relationship between motivation and religious belief and contrasts this with the gulf between personal experience and its interpretation by others. A significant gap emerges, a gap that ascribes status on the one hand or infamy on the other, depending on who might witness and later interpret events. Querry is an architect, and a very famous and successful one. When he arrives up the river at a leprosy hospital in Central Africa, however, no-one knows this. 

He is perhaps just another European running away from something and arriving ahead of a chase, perhaps to depart again just as quickly when the exigencies of daily life crowd out the self-serving romance of doing good. He meets Dr Colin who has devoted his life - and that of his wife! – to his fight against the disease. His hospital is in tatters. He has little equipment and fewer resources, and his wife is dead. He works, however, every waking minute to serve the needs of his leper patients. There are cures. If only he had the means. 

Querry, the Querrry, the famous architect, reinvents himself as a builder to realise a new hospital. So in this remote African backwater, a person who has slogged through life apparently to achieve little is partnered by a celebrity who comes with nothing, asks nothing, but can make things happen. Deo Gratias is a leper. He has lost all of his digits from both hands and feet. He is totally stumped. He is also regularly in pain, driven mad by the nervous reaction to his condition. One night he goes missing. A community member goes off in search and finds him semi-submerged in a pool. Might he be in danger of drowning? He stays with Deo Gratias until daylight and thus save a limited life. Was this Christian charity? Was it something more basic? Were there any motives whatsoever? Or perhaps was it a miracle? To judge on the latter, why not consult with the Fathers in the Mission, or the nuns in the convent? Why not try the opinion of a devout believer, someone like Rycker? He lives along the river with his wife, Marie. He is considerably older than her. His demands on life are within the confines of the box, and the box has the instructions printed on the outside. Marie’s demands on life have yet to locate the box. Querry spends some time talking to him, and then to her, and then him, and then her again... 

Rycker likes a drink. So does Querry. Arguably it is a miracle that the hospital gets built at all. Thus it’s also a story, and Parkinson arrives in its pursuit. The Querry has been located and an apparently unscrupulous paparazzo arrives via the fastest available canoe to secure the scoop. He writes for the highest bidder and is well syndicated. He’s a mercenary, an opportunist. Querry gives him the interview he requests. The resulting published piece, only a first instalment, is surprisingly supportive. Querry, meanwhile, has been supportive of Marie Rycker in a time of personal challenge. For Dr Colin at the leproserie, a burnt-out case is a leper who has lost everything that can be lost before a cure takes hold. For more than a decade, perhaps, the leprosy hospital has been a place where neither the road not the river goes any further. This Graham Greene contrasts the selfishness of professed religious conformity with the improvisation born of a humanism that dare not call itself Christian.

From outside, the exploits of both approaches only mean something when they are interpreted and, in this respect, any beauty is firmly rooted in the combined prejudice and assumption of the beholder. And when those interpretations invent something that never happened, or translate the ordinary into something transcendental that was never intended, then it is by these falsely recorded and misunderstood consequences that we become known. A Burnt-Out Case is undoubtedly a masterpiece. View the book on amazon A Burnt-out Case (Vintage Classics)

Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton presents an enigma seen from several contrasting, some related standpoints. It seems to deal with the concept of authenticity and its consequences. In general we like things to be authentic. We like the people we meet and the possessions we own to be genuine. But what if they are not? Does it matter? The historical basis upon which Peter Ackroyd hangs the plot of his novel is the life of Thomas Chatterton, the poet who committed suicide at the slight age of eighteen. Wallis’s iconic painting of the death adorns the book’s cover and its creation in the mid-nineteenth century forms a major element of the book’s plot. There’s also an eccentric English lady who has made money from writing and drinks gin incessantly from a teaspoon. There’s an art gallery offering some works by a famous painter. They are declared fakes. 

Charles Wychwood is an ailing, none too successful poet. He has a wonderful relationship with his young son, and a cooler one with his wife who has grown used to supporting her husband’s apparent lack of achievement. One day Charles decides to raise a little capital in a sale-room, but then ends up blowing his money on a painting. It’s a portrait, professedly of a middle-aged Chatterton. So perhaps he faked his own death so he could continue his trade anonymously. The idea captivates Charles because he knows a little of the poet’s background. 

Chatterton was born in the later part of the eighteenth century. He became obsessed with a series of medieval texts and started to copy their style. Thus he became the author of bogus medieval poetry, some of which he managed to publish. Unfortunately, he chose to publish not in his own name but in the name of a lost and forgotten medieval writer, thus passing off his own modern work as “genuine”. Writers, like academics, tend to regard plagiarism as a capital offence. But in Chatterton’s case, it wasn’t plagiarism, was it? He wasn’t trying to pass off another’s work as his own. He was merely adopting a pen name which implied that the material came from a different era. One brings to mind the myriad of pop singers, pianists, opera stars, actors or even television personalities who have adapted new names and apparently different personas in their attempts to open doors. What price a genuine article? 

I recall hawkers parading through Kuta in Bali with their open wooden boxes of watches shouting, “Rolex, Cartier, genuine imitation.” But Chatterton’s mimic status was uncovered. Scandal ensued and he earned no more. Penniless in a London garret he poisoned himself. Wallis painted the scene, albeit more than a generation later, it’s apparent verisimilitude pure fake. We know the picture. The poet’s red hair contrasts with his death pallor. An arm trails on the floor, the open window above suggesting a world beyond. But, of course, the man in the picture is a model, none other than the novelist, George Meredith. He made it into this picture of faked death only because the painter fancied his wife. So if the painterly aspects of the canvas might be genuine, its context is mere reconstruction, perhaps invention. Does this devalue it? 

But what if Chatterton did not die at that young age? What if Charles Wychwood’s painting of Chatterton in middle age is genuine? Did Chatterton fake more than poems? (Even if he did actually write them!) Charles buys the painting and then visits Bristol to uncover some roots. He meets Joynson, an elderly man who speaks only in riddles. A box of the poet’s memorabilia is secured. Is any of it real? Is any of it genuine? And so the novel unfolds. What is authentic is often fake and what is genuine is often impersonated. But if a painting is worth looking at, does it matter too much if it is merely the content of a painter’s imagination? Does it have to possess authenticity, even a pedigree to be an artwork? And so what if Chatterton did, or did not die? If he did, he died accused of being a fake, which he wasn’t, because he did write his poetry. If he did not die, then perhaps he was a fake, because in that case we have no idea what else he did not write! Like all Peter Ackroyd’s writing, Chatterton makes the reader think. And by the way, Chatterton’s characters are themselves creations of the author. They aren’t genuine, are they? View the book on amazon Chatterton (Abacus Books)

Moorish Spain by Richard Fletcher

In Moorish Spain Richard Fletcher achieves a significant feat. In a short book he not only chronicles the bones of nearly a millennium of history, but also offers much that adds to our understanding of the social context, both of his chosen era in particular and of history in general.

Moorish Spain does not aspire to scholarly excellence. Richard Fletcher’s stated aim is to provide a fuller and more accurate account of Islamic rule in the Iberian peninsula than the cursory accounts offered in travel books. He also aspires to a treatment of the subject that is more accurate than the romanticised position of nineteenth century travellers, accounts that served to create and then perpetuate myth.

And paramount in this myth is the received opinion that in Moorish al-Andalus all things social were both sweetness and light and pure harmony. Not so, says Fletcher, as he chronicles power struggles, intrigues and repeated conflict. He describes the different interests that ensured that conflict, both small-scale and local or larger-scale and spread across a wider front, was never very far away. When competing parties felt that they could all benefit from interaction and trade, it was, he suggests, largely pragmatism that kept the peace.

His story begins in the early eighth century when the first invasion of what we now call Spain arrived from Morocco. It ends with the expulsion of the Mozarabes in the sixteenth century. In between, in a quite short and accessible book, he illustrates how shifting alliances and opportunity for short-term gain mix with broader views and humanitarian concerns to present a patchwork of history. And this patchwork is characterised, above all, by our inability to generalise. Throughout, it is the particular that is important.

In contrast he presents a number of generalised overviews and illustrates how none of them is more than partially correct. In a short but telling final chapter he offers a generalisation of his own to illustrate how dominant contemporary ideas can filter history in order to enhance its own credibility. Tellingly, he also reminds us of how much chronicled history relates only to the recorded opinions and lives of a wealthy, sometimes educated elite. How much detail of life in the twentieth century USA could be gleaned half a millennium from now if the only source was a telephone poll of Hollywood celebrities?

Richard Fletcher’s book therefore transcends its own subject matter. It presents a rounded, carefully reconstructed picture of an immense swathe of history. In such a short account, of course, he can only present a relatively small amount of detail, but what is there goes a long way beyond what the average reader might ever discover from a shallow tourist guide. The style is easy but never racy and the content has a feeling of reliability that suggests a second visit would be worthwhile.

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Moorish Spain

The Viceroy Of Ouidah by Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin’s The Viceroy Of Ouidah masquerades as a small book. In 50,000 words or so, the author presents a fictionalised life that has been embroidered from truth. History, hyper-reality, the supernatural and the surreal and the cocktail that creates the heady mix through which strands of story filter. Overall the experience is much bigger than the slim book suggests. We meet Francisco Manuel da Silva, a Brazilian born in the country’s north-east in the latter part of the eighteenth century. We learn a little of his background and then we follow him to Dahomey in West Africa, the modern Benin. 

He finds a place in society, consorts with kings, encounters amazons and conjoins with local culture. He also becomes a slave trader, making his considerable fortune by moving ship-loads of a cargo whose human identity is denied, as if it were merely the collateral damage of mercantilism. Francisco Manuel survives, prospers and procreates with abandon. He fathers a lineage of varied hue, a small army of males to keep the name alive and further complicate identity, and a near race of females who inherit the anonymity of their gender.  

But The Viceroy of Ouidah is much more than a linear tale of a life. Bruce Chatwin’s vivid prose presents a multiplicity of minutiae, associations, conflicts and concordances. Each pithy paragraph could be a novel in itself if it were not so utterly poetic. A random example will suffice to give a flavour. “Often the Brazilian captains had to wait weeks before the coast was clear but their host spared no expense to entertain them. His dining room was lit with a set of silver candelabra; behind each chair stood a serving girl, naked to the waist, with a white napkin folded on her arm. Sometimes a drunk would shout out, ‘What are these women?’ and Da Silva would glare down the table and say. ‘Our future murderers.’” 

 Within each vivid scene, we experience history, place, culture, and all the emotions, disappointments and achievements of imperfect lives. A jungle vibrates with untamed life around us. Treachery sours and threatens, while disease and passion alike claim their victims. It is a book to be savoured almost line by line. It provides an experience that is moving, technicoloured, but, like all lives, inevitably ephemeral. Like the outlawed trade that endowed riches, it eventually comes to nought, except of course for those who are inadvertently caught up in its net and whose lives were thus utterly changed if, indeed, they survived. 

I read The Viceroy Of Ouidah without a bookmark, always starting a few pages before where I had previously left off. Each time, I read through several pages convinced that it was my first time to see them and then I would reach a particularly striking phrase and realise I had been there before. The extent of the detail and complexity of the images present a rain-forest of detail that is completely absorbing. The Viceroy Of Ouidah is thus surely a book worth reading several times. View the book on amazon The Viceroy of Ouidah (Vintage Classics)

The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier

The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier presents a vivid story. It features two central characters, both women, who inhabit the same places but are separated by four hundred years. The two women discover not only similar experience, but also suffer similar responses, perhaps because they share the same genes. The two women are of the same stock. Ella Turner is an American, a trained but not practising midwife, who has moved to France. Her husband, Rick, has a new overseas posting. 

They seem to get on well, but Rick is very focused on his career and hardly seems to notice how difficult is Ella’s transition to European life. Ella’s surname, Turner, is in fact derived from the French Tournier. There is a recorded immigrant in her family’s past. So life in France is potentially a return to roots of a kind and she decides to take the opportunity to do some research. Luckily, her family used to live in the region where she and Rick have settled. And thus she discovers a family of Hugenots, French Protestant converts who migrate to Calvin’s Switzerland in search of security and tolerance. As Ella carries out her search, her hair, perhaps coincidentally, changes colour. Isabelle de Moulin was the ancestor that Ella discovers.

She found herself moved by a vision of the Virgin Mary in which a blue, a vivid, variable blue of a fabric features memorably. It’s a blue that appears in dreams, is recalled when her sexual maturity beckons experience. And her hair turns red, giving her the nickname, La Rousse. She is soon pregnant. And the father, Etienne Tournier, does the honourable thing, but, as is customary for him and his family, without a great deal of honour. But there is turmoil around. There is a new faith, a protester’s church that the Tourniers espouse. Isabelle’s visions of Virgin Blue cause internal conflict, a conflict that seems to focus in her daughter, Marie. 

Threat of persecution forces flight over the border. Ella, meanwhile, is learning a lot about France, Hugenots and her family’s origins. She visits a library, finds a family bible and meets a librarian called Jean-Paul, perhaps not coincidentally named after a Pope. They share and interest, pursue it and then find more in common. Ella begins to suffer blue visions of her own. And, with her own life in turmoil, she follows her ancestors to Switzerland to uncover more of their history. What she finds shocks her and reveals how a fundamentally female energy has the power to transcend time in order to colour experience. The novel’s denouement is truly surprising and not a little shocking. But what Tracy Chevalier does not do in The Virgin Blue is tie up all the ends or explain all detail. And this is eventually one of the book’s strengths. 

When all of Isabelle’s and Ella’s trials and tribulations have passed by, there are still questions, loose ends and unmade decisions. The Virgin Blue thus presents rounded characters whose vulnerabilities and inconsistencies render them thoroughly credible. There are few writers who present women as complete characters pursuing their own independent, incomplete lives, but Tracy Chevalier is one of them. View the book on amazon The Virgin Blue