Religious fiction
Burning up
Peter Ackroyd
Blood. Red, Sister Rose Thomas Keneally (Collins £3.00) A Crown of Feathers Isaac Bashevis Singer (Cape £2.95) It takes a certain talent to turn a legend of piety and martydom into an interesting or substantial narrative, especially when its heroine is so consumed by faith that very little else can survive the tire and when what little character which has emerged over the centuries has been ruined by the unerringly bad dramatic sense of Bernard Shaw. It is St Joan, of course, who is the superstar of Blood Red, Sister Rose and Mr Keneally has managed to raise a heroine who burns with a great deal more heat than light,
but who has that inexplicable particle which turns a character into a person. Keneally's portrait is incomplete in the sense that it stops short before Joan's execution and trial, but they have been detailed so exhaustively that it would take divine guidance to wrench them into fictional shape. Instead, Keneally opens his narrative with the disastrous childhoods of Joan and the Dauphin, intertwining them so that they become almost familial, and closes it with the crowning of the pale King. Although this is generically an historical novel, it manages to avoide the irritating archaicisms which plague those novels in which anyone born before the eighteenth century has the vocabulary of an illuminated manuscript, and and it also avoids those vulgar romanticisms which some novelists use in the mistaken belief that history lends enchantment to an otherwise tedious over-view. By constructing the novel as a series of short episodes, and by employing a quasi-dramatic dialogue, Keneally saves history from its text-books.
The time and place are rich in mystery, of course, and it would take a simpleton to remove the capital letters out of the Dark Ages. It is, in fact, something of a paradox that the Europe of this novel should seem a more ancient place than it does now, some six centuries later, but I suppose it needs an Australian like Mr Keneally to appreciate just how Dark a Continent can be. The religion which Keneally describes has much more substance than our present hygenic interdenominationalism (reminding one ineluctably of Tillotson and the worse excesses of the seventeenth century), and he has managed against all the Odds to make fifteenth-century Christianity credible and almost interesting. It is naturally very difficult to translate the myths of supernature into human terms; since the distinction is only to be resolved in some extraterrestrial nightmare, any attempt to impose religion upon a novel's 'people' will reduce the novel to a drugged and opiate state, and the characters themselves will seem too good, or too bad, to be true. Keneally has resolved the problem by invoking those pagan deities who are more accustomed to working in, through or on the poor doomed flesh. Joan's 'voices' are as insistent as bad blood, and hint more of the natural sacrifices of a Waste Land than the blisses of Christian martydom Rose : " takes sword ... as wife takes husband'' And, surprisingly, it works. The novel has a
rich but discreet prose which rises to its several occasions without rhodomontade and gazdookeries, and describes with great efficiency the historical characters who totter through this book in borrowed garments which are natural
ly too big for them. In addition, Keneally has been able to surround the received legend with enough detail and personal complexity to make it credible; Joan's barren womb is the metaphor which runs through the whole narrative, and the Dauphin has exactly that right kind of self-serving gullibility. Keaneally should also win a prize as the first novelist to appreciate that those revolting medieval battles in which blunder and formality strive for the upper hand could actually happen. I liked this book. The religious novel is not, of course, an outward sign of inward grace; It is what it
appears, and it is more within the province of the novelist to dramatise the difference between body and spirit, act and aspiration, than to try doggedly or piously to make them coalesce. This seems to be Isaac Singer's particular talent in his latest collection of short stories, A Crown of Feathers. One of them, 'A Day In Coney Island', concerns a Yiddish writer, a weaver of demons and sprites, who is perpetually "one step from the truth" but who is always trapped in the ineluctable surface of daily and visible life. And Singer's less than benign humour is reserved for those poor souls who seek blindly for the 'truth' wherever it might appear: in 'the Bishop's Robe', an elderly American couple can only find consolation in a gas-filled room when a spiritualist robs them of the things of this world, and Singer gives the impression that their fate is not wholly undeserved. And in the title-story of this collection, among the ghosts and demons of old Poland, Singer allows himself the luxury of a personal statement: "Because if there is such a thing as truth, it is as intricate and as hidden as a crown of feathers."
His stories are almost as simple as his occasional moralising — so simple, in fact, that they are obviously highly artificial. It may be that his fanciful vision of a world of demons, when combined with a rather less fanciful belief that the material world is riddled with fatality and evanescence, is sharp enough to sustain only the simple momentum of a narrative. Certainly Singer's art is very much one of omission: but perhaps there is no other way to achieve that much neglected and complex phenomenon of the 'story'.
It is always possible, of course, to have a surfeit of common sense and benign wisdom and 1 stiggest that you read this book only from time to time. There is something a little naive — and even more naive for being intentionally so — about this catalogue of poor Polish Jewry which is not dissimilar to celebrations in this country of peasant positively oodling with felt life and natural foods. But the stories are urbane and sophisticated for all that, and life as it really is spreads through them like a stain.
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