An interesting compendium of the various treatments and cures provided by medieval doctors. As it turns out, they were much better in some areas, in particular the treatment of battlefield injuries, than you might expect: men survived some truly horrific injuries and lived to fight another day. However, there was a little too much of the old and tired trope of the Church banning research. Nevertheless, a good research book for the period.
What to make of those tales of early medieval saints who stood neck deep in freezing water for hours at a time, or who put to sea in tiny coracles without oars, trusting to God to take them where He would, be that to a new land or a water grave? They are men so very far from modern sympathies and sensibilities that it’s almost impossible to believe that they did such things – but they did.
Bringing them to life is difficult. Frederick Buechner, however, managed this feat brilliantly in his novel, Godric. He attempts it again in Brendan, a story about the Irish saint famous for setting forth in one of those little boats, to not quite the same effect. Where Godric is narrated by the saint himself, and credibly told in such wise, Brendan is told by a companion and friend, who stands in some ways for the reader: unsure but interested. However, in such matters, lack of certainty is ultimately fatal: the water will freeze the blood, the waves close over the boat, the narrative founder on ‘maybe’.
The book does, however, succeed in portraying well the sheer strangeness of 6th century Ireland and how very far it’s culture was from ours today. So read Brendan for its lyrical sensibility and its window into a very strange world.
The collection of stories about the dragon, Griaule, gathered in this volume contain one of the most extraordinary ideas in fantasy fiction: a dragon so huge that it forms the landscape: a mouth that opens into a vast cavern, a back that forms a range of hills, claws like towers. The dragon in question is petrified, an evolving ecosystem of life living on and in its remains. But although it does not move, it still, apparently, lives in some geological way, its influence moulding and shaping the lives of those who inhabit the nearby settlements and further afield.
As I said, it’s one of the most fascinating ideas ever put on page. But as to whether you will like it, that depends a lot on what you think of magical realism. As written, the book draws a lot from that genre, even to its setting in an invented but clearly South or Central American country. If you love magical realism then you’ll adore The Dragon Griaule. If you hate the genre, then steer clear of this novel. For myself, I am relatively indifferent to magical realism, in particular a realism that generally concentrates on the degraded and the decadent, so that reduced my appreciation for the book. A brilliant concept written in a style that I am not particularly sympathetic towards.
In between other books, at the moment I am re-reading some of the stories I read when I was young. Seeing Blind Voices on the shelf at my parents’ house, I remembered being enchanted by an atmosphere of fairground mysticism when I read it and, taking it from the bookshelf, I read the blurb and then the back cover – and remembered again that this was Tom Reamy’s only book and that he had died before Blind Voices was published. This aura of tragedy overlay my memory of the book: all I could remember was a halo of heat and brassy fairground music; I had no recollection of the story itself, other than that I had enjoyed it.
So I brought Blind Voices home and set to reading it again. And, yes, there was a travelling show, although it was an out-and-out freak show rather than the travelling fair with outlandish exhibits that I vaguely recalled, and yes, the story is suffused with the heat and dust of summer on the flat grain plains of the American heartlands. But is it a good story?
Well, yes, but when I first read it – checking the copyright date that was 46 years ago! – I had not yet read Ray Bradbury. The story is basically Something Wicked This Way Comes with more sex (I’m rather surprised that the teenage me that read the story didn’t remember this at all) and children who you start off thinking are protagonists but end up being merely observers. Now, it’s clear that it’s a good story rather than a great story, one that wears its influences so clearly that it’s almost a homage to Bradbury.
However, it does still retain its air of quiet tragedy for I think it’s clear that Reamy would have gone on to be a major writer in his own right if he had not died so young. He had talent and he was on his way towards finding his own voice but he had not got there yet with this book.
A note about the cover: it’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen, and bears no relation to anything in the book. Please don‘t judge this book by its cover!
Few writers have been as well served by their editors as JRR Tolkien. If it wasn’t for the almost lifelong labours of his son, Christopher Tolkien, we would never have had the posthumous publication of The Silmarillion, let alone the extraordinary unveiling of Tolkien’s sub-creation that we read in Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle-earth, which presents his father’s writing as it developed, revealing far more of the depth underlying it than we would have seen with just the work the Good Professor published during his lifetime.
With Christopher Tolkien’s death in 2020, we might have feared that Tolkien’s subsequent editors would not have the same dedication, nor the expertise, that allowed Christopher Tolkien to uncover the depths of his father’s work. It looks like that fear is unjustified. Brian Sibley has proved just as deft a hand here, in his presentation of the history of Númenor, as his predecessor in the editorial chair. Perhaps not so surprising, as Brian Sibley was responsible for what remains by far the best adaptation of Tolkien’s work, the BBC radion production of The Lord of the Rings. So if you have ever wondered how the kings of Númenor rose to power, and how they fell from that estate, this is the place to find out.
The DCI Ryan detective novels set in my beloved Northumberland have been huge bestsellers so I thought I ought to read the first – besides, Lindisfarne is wonderful and I wanted to spend some time there, albeit in story rather than in person.
Well, I can see why the books have been such a success: I missed my stop on the tube because I was so engrossed! There’s no higher praise from a Londoner.
I’ve also discovered a new genre: crime romance. While ostensibly a crime novel, it’s mainly a female fantasy romance, where the brooding, handsome, rather damaged Detective Ryan is not only opened up, put back in contact with his emotions, and taught to love again by the female protagonist, Dr Anna Taylor, but to show it’s the ultimate wish fulfilment, Anna also turns her future mother-in-law into a new mother for herself, in place of her own dead mum.
So basically it’s a female wish fulfilment fantasy dressed up as a crime novel. Sadly, the Lindisfarne location didn’t come across too strongly either.
I’d not heard of this book before but apparently it’s very well known in America. Having read it, I can see why. It was published in 1969. The author dedicated it to Martin Luther King. It’s basically the Civil Rights’ Movement as a children’s book, arguing for integration of the races through the story of a white boy and an old black man cast away on an island in the Caribbean. In that respect, it seems slightly old fashioned in its insistence on Martin Luther King’s old dictum, that people be judged by their character rather than their colour, when set against today’s fractionated landscape where people are judged precisely by their position in the current victims’ hierarchy.
The castaway boy, Phillip, isn’t particularly prejudiced but he judges the old black man he is cast away with through the eyes of the 1940s, when the story is set. Then, in a nice twist, Phillip loses his sight and has to rely on old Timothy for his survival. It turns out that Timothy is prepared to go further than Phillip would have had any right to expect to ensure the boy’s survival. It’s a moving turn to the story, and gives it a seriousness that it would otherwise lack.
I’m not sure that it’s particularly relevant today, at least not in Britain, but it serves as an interesting testament to where people were coming from when it came out.
By the end of the Synod of Whitby, Britain had become for the most part a Christian country.
The last pagan Anglo-Saxon kingdom was on the Isle of Wight. Its inhabitants clung to their beliefs. Shortly before the Whitby Synod, in one of the ironies of the pagan conversion, King Wulfhere of Mercia, who was Penda’s son, invaded the island and baptised the islanders by force.
To this point, the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons had been peaceable, at least within the context of the power plays of rival kings. But with all the country now Christian, the last pagan holdouts began to appear unconscionable, and even more so when the islanders on Wight reverted to paganism.
The islanders held to the old gods until 686, when the king of Wessex, Cædwalla, brought his army across the Solent. Cædwalla did not give the islanders the benefit of the doubt: he killed King Arwald, the last pagan, in battle, executed his heirs and either killed or deported the islanders, settling the Isle of Wight with people from his own kingdom.
The Romans carried the day at the Synod of Whitby. Oswiu ordered that Roman practices should be adopted throughout his realm. Not all the monks of Lindisfarne were willing to abandon the customs of their father. Those that would not, withdrew from Lindisfarne, returning to Iona.
The church in Northumbria spent the next decades delicately balancing integrating the old Irish elements into the new church while trying to prevent the more zealous advocates of Rome denigrating the achievements of its founders. Much of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History is dedicated to achieving this balance.