All dead
Paul Ableman
Beltran in Exile William Watson (Chatto £5.95) '1 am not dead. . . Who is dead?. .. Who is dead? . . . Who do you think is dead? . . . Thibaud was dead. . .Thibaud is perhaps dead. . .Thibaud is dead. .Thibaud was dead. . .Berenguer was dead too . . .the old knight dead.
And all on page 135. This superior romance is a dirge. an elegy, a lament for the dead knights of the Temple. Yes, and for the Temple itself and for chivalric Christianity. By the last page, dead, all dead.
Each age reconstructs the past in its own image. Here we have a distinctly trendy 13th century. Though dripping in gore and flashing with sword-play, there is a flavour of the strip cartoon in the crisp, episodic structure and refusal of any of the character's to be cowed by living in a permanent shambles. 'Am I killed?' chirps Philip the Fair. almost merrily. And Beltran, last of the Templars. laconic and, while a stickler for the Rule, tuned into his own standards, clasps gauntlets with Philip Marlowe down the centuries.
Historical romance of the kind purveyed by. say. Jean Plaidy, is essentially costume drama designed to liberate Lust from the dreary embrace of reality and pose it against sumptuous decor. To secure and hold its massrie audience, however, it must also have narrative drive and plausible incident. This is the least one can ask of the genre and Mr Watson is quite up to supplying it. But suppose we ask what is the most we can expect from fiction set in the past? It is surely to provide a focus. in phase with the ascertainable historical reality, for contemplation of a lost world. The events and characters are less important in themselves than as evocations of the surge of history. It is the brooding they inspire rather than the tales they tell which is the key to their excellence. Judged by such criteria, Miss Plaidy vanishes but Mr Watson dilates. He has produced what may well prove to be a minor classic: the definitive romance of the myth of the legend of The Templars.
The story spans the period from the fall of Acre in 1291 to the burning of Jacques de Molay, last Master of the Temple, in 1314. The Order of the Temple was that supreme paradox of Christianity, an organization of soldier-monks, which, to boggle the mind to its limits, also became Europe's first centralized bank. A recent television documentary tried to trace the Lost Treasure of the Tempters. There is no hard evidence that any such treasure was ever brought out of the East but Mr Watson has cast it as the true hero of his book. Beltran, the human protagonist. is the haunted guardian of the gold which ends up immured by him in a cave in Provence.
Another order of fighting priests. the Hospitallers. was also generated by the Crusades. It was less powerful than the Templars and so less likely to succomb to the luxury and debauchery which, grossly exaggerated by libel. enabled Philip to impeach, torture and burn the Templars in order to confiscate their wealth. Much of this loot ultimately went to the Hospitallers and its remote financial descendant to-day provides the mercy vehicles of the St John's Ambulance Brigade. Thus. the Hospital survived to become a meek modern charity while the Temple was scoured from the earth. It is reflections of this kind on the mutability of institutions, the continuity of traditions and the ultimate solidarity of the ages which are generated by true historical romances such as Mr Watson's.
I fear a little for the potential sales of this excellent book because the author has been sparing, to the point of asceticism, with love interest. The dispirited admission by a one-handed Templar that `Shirin is my leman' is the hottest line in the book, while the Venetian banker. Zazzara, since he is keen to rejoin his girlfriend, must be counted a molten voluptuary. There is, on the other hand, an abundance of hard-core thanatography. Some of it struck me as getting close to sadistic exploitation. The burning of the slaves with Greek Fire was very nasty indeed .
'Long beams of sunlight came patiently through the treetops. They made the garden an arcade of brightness. The king stood in a quiet. and moved not even a finger. The lizard rustled and was hid, behind it a flash of green melted to nothing on the sight.'
This is quirky. original. slightly patronizing prose that works very well as disengaging the reader's mind from the rhythms and assumptions of contemporary narrative. thus opening an illusionary window onto the past. It uses deliberate archaisms ('was hid') sparingly but tellingly. In its anthropormorphizing tendency (teams of sunlight came patiently') it shifts the psychology of the narrative towards fairy-talc but the grimness of the events compensates for this. Even the grammatical solicisms ('stood in a quiet') do not suggest whimsy so much as calculated stylization. Mr Watson has forged an instrument that serves him well even if it does not transcend the broad conventions of more commonplace historical romance.
It must, however, be admitted that the characterization throughout is perfunctory and the gory events fail to engender a corresponding profundity of response. The people in this book seem to sense that they are really safe in the deterministic confines of a novel rather than out on the vertiginous ranges of experience when the future is unknown. What we have been given by Mr Watson is essentially an entertaining historical fiction but one with some power to expand consciousness. It is no mean gift.
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