The Holy Sinner - Thomas Mann

 It's a long way from Death in Venice to The Holy Sinner, nearly forty years in fact, so you'd expect them to be different.  They are very different.  There are similarities, of course, and contrasts.  Instead of suppressed homosexual paedophilia, here we have fraternal incest in no way suppressed.  Instead of extreme contemporary realism, here we have a magical medieval world in which the bells of Rome ring out without human agency and a penitent endures seventeen years chained to a rock in the middle of a lake by turning himself into a hairy hedgehog.  Magical realism twenty years before its time, perhaps.

Mann took his story from the 12th century Minnesinger Hartmann von Aue.  The twins Wiligis and Sibylla, only children of Duke Grimald of Flanders, are brought up together to the extent that they share sleeping quarters.  After inheriting the dukedom, Wiligis crosses the bedroom and has sex with his sister.  She becomes pregnant.  Wiligis, not essentially a bad man and still very young, immediately heads off on crusade, leaving Sibylla to govern in his place.  She secludes herself in the fortress of the wise knight Eisengrein.  She gives birth to a beautiful healthy son but can take no joy in it because news arrives of Wiligis's death.  Sibylla is beyond distraught and submits to Eisengrein's advice.  Leave the child's fate to God.  The baby is sealed in a barrel and cast into the North Sea along with a tablet explaining that he is a child of sin but his parents are noble; if he is found, raise him accordingly; there is money in the barrel with which to do so.

Poor fishermen find the barrel and take it back to their base on the island of St Dunstan.  Abbot Gregory opens the barrel and finds the child.  He entrusts him to one of the fishermen whose wife has just given birth.  He gives the child his own name.  Ultimately the child is raised as a novice monk - until he discovers the secret of his birth.  At seventeen he sets off as a knight errant with the aim of finding his parents.  Instead he marries Sibylla, becomes Duke of Flanders de jure uxoris and father's two daughters by her.

Then he finds out the truth a second time.  He immediately renounces his dukedom and becomes a beggar, ending up on the rock.  The Lamb of God (literally) tells wise men in Rome that their next pope is tethered to a rock in a lake in the north - it is their God-given mission to go and find him.  Thus Gregory the child of sin becomes a very good pope.  He is reunited with Sibylla whom he prudently decides to refer to as his sister.

It is actually very entertaining.  Mann writes in a cod medieval style using the authorial voice of the Irish monk Cormac, who is visiting the monastery of St Gall (where so many ancient manuscripts were later found), who provides us with much commentary.  I raced through The Holy Sinner, which is absolutely my cup of tea.  I'm no Mann scholar - indeed, I had never heard of The Holy Sinner - and the only novel by him I had previously read was the aforementioned Death in Venice (reviewed on this blog).  That didn't inspire me to discover more.  The Holy Sinner definitely has.

Hodd - Adam Thorpe

I first discovered Adam Thorpe when I picked up Ulverton from the carousel at my local library.  The structure intrigued me but, as explained in my review on this blog, it didn't satisfy me.  The key device was stretched too far.

Hodd, though, was written twenty years later (2010) and Thorpe is able to subordinate his clever literary devices to a complex yet cohesive narrative.  It works well - extremely well.

Essentially what we have is the translation of a medieval monastic manuscript about Robin Hood.  Our translator, the supplier of footnotes and marginalia, is a real character deeply mentally scarred by his experiences in World War One.  We come to know him through his textual comments but he never dominates.  The book is about the text, which turns out to be the proto-text for all Robin Hood legends.  I don't think I am giving anything away by saying that our medieval monk turns out to be the creator of the first and best-known Hood ballad.  The monk is compelling; he is turned ninety and knew Hood personally as a boy, a century ago.  Who is he?  In real life we never find out, but it is a major revelation (which I obviously won't spoil here) when we find out how he fits into the Hood mythology.

Perhaps the best thing about the book is that it remains the monk's story, not Hood's.  The boy had an interesting and unusual life before encountering the outlaw and it is that part of his life which draws him back to his roots for the dark finale, his last experience of the non-monastic world.

Let's be clear, Thorpe began as a fascinating and important writer with Ulverton.  I don't know (and must find out) when he made the breakthrough into a fully-fledged great modern novelist, but he certainly is one in Hodd.  My highest recommendation.  A must-read.

The Virgin in the Ice - Ellis Peters

This was the sixth Brother Cadfael mystery by Ellis Peters, also known as Edith Pargeter, published back in 1982.  Peters was the original author of medieval murder mysteries, a field which has now proliferated into a double sub-genre of history and crime.  I can't remember if Peters came before or after Umberto Eco's overblown In the Name of the Rose.  To my memory they were coeval.  Certainly Peters wrote a lot more of them.

In this story, it is coming up to Christmas 1139, the first year of the Anarchy - "years in which the saints slept" - when the last of the The House of Normandy, Stephen and Matilda, vied for the English crown. Cadfael is called away from Shewsbury to nearby Bromfield to tend a monk who has been beaten and left for dead.  Meanwhile the authorities are searching for a brother and sister, heirs to a great estate, who have gone missing.  And then Cadfael himself finds the titular virgin entombed in a frozen beck.

The plot unfolds smoothly.  The writing tends to the stilted, but I find that preferable to giving historical figures a version of modern speech,  Peters is immersed in her period - a similar period in which she wrote her most significant works as Pargeter (for example, the Brothers of Gwynedd trilogy) and brings it vividly to life.  The villain was fairly obvious by about halfway and the twist at the end which is supposed to make us gasp made me cringe.  Nevertheless, a minor classic of the sub-genre which gave much pleasure.

Selections from the Carmina Burana -David Parlett

This has become the classic modern translation.  I don't know if it's accurate or not, because I don't speak medieval German and my Latin is so rusty it's effectively rotted away.  As the title says, plainly enough, it's only a selection, but it's the best we've got, certainly in English.

Only tiny extracts of the original manuscript made into Orff's cantata and Parlett handily provides a section giving, effectively, the lyrics.  Otherwise the text is sorted Sermons and Satires, Love and Nature, and Drinking and Gaming Songs.  That last is the key - these are songs, always meant to sung or chanted aloud, probably to a musical accompaniment.  The most famous of all, though it's hard to see why on this evidence, is the Archpoet's Confession, a slightly mocking mea culpa from a reprobate who isn't really sorry at all.

The Archpoet seems to have been referred to by that title in life, but that's pretty much all we know.  He was almost certainly in the service of the Archbishop of Cologne who died in 1165.  Nothing in the Carmina (which translates as the Songbook of Buren, a Benedictine monastery in Bavaria) is later than about 1230.  So, for all its flaws and disappointments, it stands as an almost unique window on central European scholarly life in the age of Richard the Lionheart, whose magnificent mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was an early sponsor of the Goliard tradition.

Parlett's notes are very good indeed.

Morality Play - Barry Unsworth

Shameful though it is, it took Unsworth's recent death to remind me to check out his work.  I scanned through the list and this one leapt out at me.  It's medieval, which I like, and it's about drama, just like my PhD.  I acquired a copy, jumped in - and was immediately blown away with how well Unsworth writes.  He doesn't lay on the history research with the proverbial trowel, yet there are things here even I didn't know about.  Did medieval players really have a lexicon of hand gestures with which to express emotion?  I genuinely don't know but if they didn't they should have and it sounds absolutely convincing in this text.  It is also a murder mystery with a paedophile serial killer on the loose in County Durham.  But that's not what Morality Play is about.  Unsurprisingly, it's about morality and the moral code of the age, which is obviously different to ours.

Most of all, though, this is high literature, plainly but beautifully written with the editorial control of a true master.  It might only be 188 pages long but there is no way this novel is slight.