I'm a bit of a fan of medieval mysteries especially where there are monastic and religious dimensions to them. That's what drew me to reviewing this one. My hope is that the history is well -researched and so the story gives, by its background a helpful view of the life of the times as well as hoping that the psycho-spiritual insights are well depicted and explored.
The blurb names well something of what I look for in general:
The mid-fourteenth century was a time not only of burgeoning towns, majestic cathedrals, and nascent universities, but also of debauchery and violence, the Black Death and Inquisition, torture and ordeals. In his encounters with noblemen and peasants, alchemists and hermits, monks and heretics, knights and revolutionaries, prostitutes and miscreants from the medieval underworld, Justin comes to realize that he is entirely on his own as he confronts his personal moral failings and struggles to find faith in a world where God no longer seems to exist.
So the question is, does this book do these things?
Well, yes. And I quite enjoyed the moving from scenario to scenario which gave opportunity each time for characters and their circumstances and interactions to give expositions of the issues spiritually and political-economically. Admittedly there is a degree of anachronism in vocabulary, but that in necessary.
The revolt scenes brought home to me the issue of not having strategy or thinking through longer-term scenarios and I wondered if that was fair to peasant revolts -probably that is the way of things then: largely uneducated people with only hazy ideas of how the wider world worked might well have acted in 'haste' by today's standards and their vulnerabilities would have been viciously exploited by the powerful wealthy. Also the human vulnerability to being carried along by emotional arousal which then dampens those who have misgivings from expressing them (to their/our own detriment) is portrayed and is salutary.
On the downside, I felt that I didn't quite feel I connected with the characters, perhaps they felt a bit not-fully three dimensional. I liked, for example, the hermit in the woods but I did feel he was a bit bombastic and not at all sure if I believed in him as a character. It was good though, to be reminded that people in the middle ages were not uniformly faithful Christians and of how much the established church worked as the propaganda arm of feudalism -also salutary given that there are forces abroad today which seem intent on getting us back into that sort of society -complete with appeals to divinely-ordained obedience to those in authority. I was amused, btw, when in the planning of the revolt a character who was presented as being very concerned for obeying authorities persuaded herself, apparently, to support her village's revolt reasoning that by electing the village elder to do this, he had become the authority to be obeyed. I wondered whether my skepticism about that move arose from feeling that maybe that way of thinking seemed quite 'modern' or whether our 'modern' sensibilities about such things actually do trace back to such perspectives back then (but among peasants...?)
It gave me pause for thought about how deep-set the deference to hierarchy seemed to be in the sense that the theory of feudal estates can be presented as a kind of covenant of mutual aid -but how easily it was subverted and became oppressive without real appeal or recourse when those at the pinnacles of the hierarchies failed to play their benign patriarchal role. I was shocked by the no-doubt accurate picture of a quota being presented as a having a share in produce when it was clearly nothing of the kind and resulted in imiseration of those producing the food when there were times of low harvest. The early chapters of Exodus came to mind.
The issue of anachronism for me came to a head when we were in the monastery. The Bartholomew character, and the prior, were mostly speaking in ways that would be more characteristic of mid-twentieth century evangelicals than medieval Roman Catholics -albeit with a deferral to the authority of the Church tacked on. I recognise the value of exploring the unhelpful answers and methodologies of evangelicalism of that kind and giving voice to the honest questions and puzzlements and even inconsistencies it raises. However, it did irritate me a bit. I guess I wanted rather to gain insight into how the putative thought-world of the novel would work rather than see it translated into more contemporary (and north American) idioms and even concerns. I did value the reaching past mere doctrinal rectitude and the noting of the polyvocalism of the early church fathers in reading scripture and it is important to bring that to the table.
As part of the review agreement, I have to post a review (however partial) within a month of getting the book and I'm still reading it! So it may be that some of my concerns are addressed as I read the rest. I am enjoying it and I may yet add to this review if there is more of significance to be said.
One with the Father on Bookshop
Richard Evanoff’s Website
#OneWithTheFather
I should put on record that I received this as an e-book for the purposes of review. I was under no obligation to review favourably or otherwise, merely to offer some kind of review within a month of receiving the book.
This review was added to on 14 April to comment more on the monastery episodes.
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