Trapped in bodies of clay
May. 17th, 2020 04:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I've spent most of my free time this week rereading the five books in Catherine Jinks's Pagan Chronicles series — a collection of books which I have loved for close to two-thirds of my life, and to which I always return for comfort and consolation. When asked which books have had the most impact on me, I'll generally immediately answer with Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, but if I take proper time to consider the question, it's obvious that while Pullman's books are indirectly responsible for a lot of the choices in my life that got me to where I am, what I do, and who I'm with now, the Pagan series got into my bones and blood in a much deeper way.
I talk about these books a lot, but I'm not sure I've ever laid out what they're all about — or at least not recently.
The Pagan Chronicles consist of five works of YA historical fiction, spanning roughly a forty-year period. All books are written from a very close, first-person present tense perspective, so if you do not click with the narrators, you are unlikely to enjoy spending a great deal of time inhabiting their internal monologues. The first three books take place over three years in the late 1180s, and are narrated by the eponymous Pagan, an illegitimate Arab Christian, born in Crusader-occupied Bethlehem, raised in a monastery which taught him to read and gave him an abiding impatience with monastic authority. The fourth book jumps forward in time by about twenty years, and is narrated by Isidore Orbus, yet another orphan (the clue is in his second name), who loves books and finds people frustrating. The fifth and final book was published more than ten years after the original four, and is narrated by Babylonne, Pagan's illegitimate duaghter who was raised by awful abusive relatives who treat her appallingly.
The first book, Pagan's Crusade, is set in Jerusalem during its siege by Saladin. Pagan, having left the monastery and spent several years getting into a great deal of trouble with various petty criminals in the town, is sixteen years old and desperate. Fleeing debt-collectors threatening him with violence, he winds up working as squire to a Templar knight, Lord Roland, hoping that the Templars' wealth and prestige will protect him. He is cynical, quick witted and sarcastic, and his life experiences have taught him that the weak and dispossessed will always be the prey of those more powerful. He is initially baffled by Roland — who really is the one genuinely earnest, good-hearted and selfless person in the whole of Jerusalem — thinking him naive, saintly, and far too unworldly for his own good, but as the novel progresses, he comes to truly love and respect him. Pagan's personal story is set against the broader backdrop of the siege and capture of Jerusalem by Saladin, and Roland's subsequent loss of faith in the entire Templar cause. Pagan, meanwhile, has to deal with leaving the land of his birth, and the trauma and disorientation that comes with that.
This book is followed by Pagan In Exile, in which Roland and Pagan travel to Roland's home and noble family in Languedoc. Ostensibly, they have returned there in an attempt to persuade Roland's dreadful relatives — father Galhard and brothers Berengar and Jordan — to join the Crusade and try to retake the 'Holy Land,' but it is obvious to any reader that this will prove futile. Roland's patient, calm, saintly goodness is in stark contrast to the violence and volatility of the family from which he comes, and he and Pagan become swept up in a dreadful squabble between Roland's relatives and various other local lords. The squabble inevitably turns violent, with those Roland was trying to protect — a community of peaceful adherents to the heretical Cathar sect, including a woman with whom Roland falls tragically in love — bearing the brunt of the violence. Meanwhile, Pagan is miserable as a refugee away from the land of his birth, and feels that Roland has abandoned him in a futile attempt to win his family's love. The book concludes with Roland having reached the decision that he can 'no longer follow Christ with a drawn sword,' and resolving to take monastic vows, a decision in which Pagan (who has come to view Roland as not just a mentor and friend, but as a substitute parent) swiftly follows.
This leads, therefore, to the third book, Pagan's Vows, in which the pair have become novice monks. Roland, wracked with guilt that he had loved a heretic, falls into what a modern reader would recognise as depression, setting himself on a path of self-denial in the hope that by transcending all earthly ties he will achieve some kind of peaceful absolution. Pagan chafes under monastic rules, clashes with the novice master (who has recognised that Pagan is extremely intelligent and pushes him to study medieval grammar and rhetoric, but whose pedagogical skills leave a lot to be desired), and uncovers a corrupt consipiracy of blackmail and embezzlement in the monastery. The book ends with Pagan and Roland parting: Roland to remain in the monastery (and with a newfound understanding that joy and human connection will strengthen his religious vocation, not undermine it), and Pagan to continue his education outside it, attending cathedral school and, it is hoped, university.
The results of this education are plain in the fourth book, Pagan's Scribe. Here we see Pagan through the eyes of misanthropic, bookish Isidore — an orphan who was abandoned in a backwoods town by clerics afraid of his frequent epileptic fits. Pagan is now in his thirties, and is a canon lawyer and archdeacon of Carcassone. After stumbling upon Isidore during a journey through Languedoc, Pagan hires him as his scribe, and the pair wind up in Carcassone when it is besieged by rapacious northern French nobility. Isidore is initially extremely unimpressed with Pagan, who he views as crude, unnecessarily worldly, and lacking in the black and white thinking which Isidore feels is essential for a proper Christian cleric. But as the book progresses, he realises that inflexibility of thinking is an impediment, and that Pagan's many positive qualities — his quick wit, his talents in argument and persuasion, his genuine lack of care as to how others perceive him, and his genuine efforts to treat everyone he encounters with empathy, no matter their religious beliefs or the strictness of their adherence to orthodox doctrine — are essential in enabling him to truly care for his parishioners. The book ends on a note of both hope and tragedy, with Isidore and Pagan replicating the close mentor-mentee friendship that Pagan found with Roland.
Pagan's Daughter, the fifth and final book, is, unsurprisingly, about Pagan's offspring. Babylonne is the orphaned daughter of a Cathar heretic who was killed in one of the waves of violence against adherents of her beliefs in thirteenth-century Languedoc. As the illegitimate daughter of a Catholic priest, Babylonne is treated appallingly by her mother's relatives, who have raised her since she was a baby, leading a peripatetic life fleeing from besieged city to besieged city, trying to avoid maurauding northern French soldiers whose attacks on their part of the world are now a permanent fixture. After one clash with her abusive relatives too many, Babylonne is forced to flee in order to avoid being married off, and, disguised as a boy (and seeking to join the exiled knights of Languedoc in their attempt to reclaim their lost lands) she encounters Isidore. Raised to hate her father — and the Catholic church — Babylonne is initially wary, but she sticks with Isidore first for expediency, and later out of genuine friendship and respect. Babylonne's life has been brutal on both a familial and broader level, but she has a surprising streak of romanticism, viewing the world through a somewhat fairytale lens. Over the course of the book she retains her fierce goodness and sense of justice, but gains a more nuanced understanding of the world.
There's a lot going on in these books, which is always astonishing to me, given that most of them are less than 200 pages long each, that they were written in the 1990s (apart from Pagan's Daughter), and aimed at teenage readers. They're a masterclass in characterisation and character voice — although all are written from that tight, first-person perspective, with short, choppy sentences that mirror the way people's thoughts really unfold, you would never mistake Pagan's thoughts for Isidore's, nor Isidore's for Babylonne's. They manage to pack in a lot of medieval politics, theology, religious controversies, and intellectual culture, without it ever feeling like too much. (I mean, I was a strange child so I actually loved all that stuff, but if you don't care about Cathar beliefs or the Benedictine Rule or the education of canon lawyers, you will find yourself caring about all these things by the time the books are finished!) For me — a lifelong atheist, raised by atheists (one of whom who was himself raised by atheists, so I'm not even culturally religious in the most superficial sense, except insofar as I grew up in a very secular culturally Christian country) — these books offered one of the clearest articulations of genuine religious faith that I've ever encountered. All of the four mentor/mentee characters — Roland, Pagan, Isidore, and Babylonne — are completely sincere in their diverse beliefs, and they live in a time which is general portrayed in popular culture as populated by people whose religious observance was unthinking, easy, and unburdened by any shades of grey. But this is not true of any of them: they are (other than Babylonne) medieval Catholic clergy whose beliefs are underpinned by a very real understanding of human flaws and frailty, by the knowledge that their world is one where the strong and powerful are encouraged to exploit the weak, and who judge people's hearts not by the orthodoxy of their practice, but by their deeds, and the effects of those deeds.
If there's one thing none of the characters have any patience for, however, it's incompetence and hypocrisy — and worst of all is incompetent hypocrisy! They are infinitely patient with people who are hurt and afraid, and save the full weight of their scorn for those abusing their positions of unearned authority. (Hilariously, in fact, I saw a scathing one-star review of Pagan's Crusade on Goodreads which castigated the book for Pagan being so contemptuous of authority! Which of course entirely missed the point — the entire point of these books is that the characters come to learn that authority must be earned, and that claimants to authority must be subject to vigorous scrutiny.)
Above all, though, these books gave me my lifelong love of stories of dispossessed, traumatised, exiled characters finding home, family and healing in each other. They gave me exactly what I wanted: characters who find themselves in exile (either in a political/geographical sense due to war, or in a psychological sense due to a lack of identification with the values of the families of their birth), and who build a home and sense of purpose within that exilic space. It is one, long, forty-year saga of found family and emotional hurt/comfort, and it gave me my lifelong love of those tropes. I've been seeking them out in fiction ever since — and every so often, I return to their source, the Pagan Chronicles, the well for me which never runs dry.
I talk about these books a lot, but I'm not sure I've ever laid out what they're all about — or at least not recently.
The Pagan Chronicles consist of five works of YA historical fiction, spanning roughly a forty-year period. All books are written from a very close, first-person present tense perspective, so if you do not click with the narrators, you are unlikely to enjoy spending a great deal of time inhabiting their internal monologues. The first three books take place over three years in the late 1180s, and are narrated by the eponymous Pagan, an illegitimate Arab Christian, born in Crusader-occupied Bethlehem, raised in a monastery which taught him to read and gave him an abiding impatience with monastic authority. The fourth book jumps forward in time by about twenty years, and is narrated by Isidore Orbus, yet another orphan (the clue is in his second name), who loves books and finds people frustrating. The fifth and final book was published more than ten years after the original four, and is narrated by Babylonne, Pagan's illegitimate duaghter who was raised by awful abusive relatives who treat her appallingly.
The first book, Pagan's Crusade, is set in Jerusalem during its siege by Saladin. Pagan, having left the monastery and spent several years getting into a great deal of trouble with various petty criminals in the town, is sixteen years old and desperate. Fleeing debt-collectors threatening him with violence, he winds up working as squire to a Templar knight, Lord Roland, hoping that the Templars' wealth and prestige will protect him. He is cynical, quick witted and sarcastic, and his life experiences have taught him that the weak and dispossessed will always be the prey of those more powerful. He is initially baffled by Roland — who really is the one genuinely earnest, good-hearted and selfless person in the whole of Jerusalem — thinking him naive, saintly, and far too unworldly for his own good, but as the novel progresses, he comes to truly love and respect him. Pagan's personal story is set against the broader backdrop of the siege and capture of Jerusalem by Saladin, and Roland's subsequent loss of faith in the entire Templar cause. Pagan, meanwhile, has to deal with leaving the land of his birth, and the trauma and disorientation that comes with that.
This book is followed by Pagan In Exile, in which Roland and Pagan travel to Roland's home and noble family in Languedoc. Ostensibly, they have returned there in an attempt to persuade Roland's dreadful relatives — father Galhard and brothers Berengar and Jordan — to join the Crusade and try to retake the 'Holy Land,' but it is obvious to any reader that this will prove futile. Roland's patient, calm, saintly goodness is in stark contrast to the violence and volatility of the family from which he comes, and he and Pagan become swept up in a dreadful squabble between Roland's relatives and various other local lords. The squabble inevitably turns violent, with those Roland was trying to protect — a community of peaceful adherents to the heretical Cathar sect, including a woman with whom Roland falls tragically in love — bearing the brunt of the violence. Meanwhile, Pagan is miserable as a refugee away from the land of his birth, and feels that Roland has abandoned him in a futile attempt to win his family's love. The book concludes with Roland having reached the decision that he can 'no longer follow Christ with a drawn sword,' and resolving to take monastic vows, a decision in which Pagan (who has come to view Roland as not just a mentor and friend, but as a substitute parent) swiftly follows.
This leads, therefore, to the third book, Pagan's Vows, in which the pair have become novice monks. Roland, wracked with guilt that he had loved a heretic, falls into what a modern reader would recognise as depression, setting himself on a path of self-denial in the hope that by transcending all earthly ties he will achieve some kind of peaceful absolution. Pagan chafes under monastic rules, clashes with the novice master (who has recognised that Pagan is extremely intelligent and pushes him to study medieval grammar and rhetoric, but whose pedagogical skills leave a lot to be desired), and uncovers a corrupt consipiracy of blackmail and embezzlement in the monastery. The book ends with Pagan and Roland parting: Roland to remain in the monastery (and with a newfound understanding that joy and human connection will strengthen his religious vocation, not undermine it), and Pagan to continue his education outside it, attending cathedral school and, it is hoped, university.
The results of this education are plain in the fourth book, Pagan's Scribe. Here we see Pagan through the eyes of misanthropic, bookish Isidore — an orphan who was abandoned in a backwoods town by clerics afraid of his frequent epileptic fits. Pagan is now in his thirties, and is a canon lawyer and archdeacon of Carcassone. After stumbling upon Isidore during a journey through Languedoc, Pagan hires him as his scribe, and the pair wind up in Carcassone when it is besieged by rapacious northern French nobility. Isidore is initially extremely unimpressed with Pagan, who he views as crude, unnecessarily worldly, and lacking in the black and white thinking which Isidore feels is essential for a proper Christian cleric. But as the book progresses, he realises that inflexibility of thinking is an impediment, and that Pagan's many positive qualities — his quick wit, his talents in argument and persuasion, his genuine lack of care as to how others perceive him, and his genuine efforts to treat everyone he encounters with empathy, no matter their religious beliefs or the strictness of their adherence to orthodox doctrine — are essential in enabling him to truly care for his parishioners. The book ends on a note of both hope and tragedy, with Isidore and Pagan replicating the close mentor-mentee friendship that Pagan found with Roland.
Pagan's Daughter, the fifth and final book, is, unsurprisingly, about Pagan's offspring. Babylonne is the orphaned daughter of a Cathar heretic who was killed in one of the waves of violence against adherents of her beliefs in thirteenth-century Languedoc. As the illegitimate daughter of a Catholic priest, Babylonne is treated appallingly by her mother's relatives, who have raised her since she was a baby, leading a peripatetic life fleeing from besieged city to besieged city, trying to avoid maurauding northern French soldiers whose attacks on their part of the world are now a permanent fixture. After one clash with her abusive relatives too many, Babylonne is forced to flee in order to avoid being married off, and, disguised as a boy (and seeking to join the exiled knights of Languedoc in their attempt to reclaim their lost lands) she encounters Isidore. Raised to hate her father — and the Catholic church — Babylonne is initially wary, but she sticks with Isidore first for expediency, and later out of genuine friendship and respect. Babylonne's life has been brutal on both a familial and broader level, but she has a surprising streak of romanticism, viewing the world through a somewhat fairytale lens. Over the course of the book she retains her fierce goodness and sense of justice, but gains a more nuanced understanding of the world.
There's a lot going on in these books, which is always astonishing to me, given that most of them are less than 200 pages long each, that they were written in the 1990s (apart from Pagan's Daughter), and aimed at teenage readers. They're a masterclass in characterisation and character voice — although all are written from that tight, first-person perspective, with short, choppy sentences that mirror the way people's thoughts really unfold, you would never mistake Pagan's thoughts for Isidore's, nor Isidore's for Babylonne's. They manage to pack in a lot of medieval politics, theology, religious controversies, and intellectual culture, without it ever feeling like too much. (I mean, I was a strange child so I actually loved all that stuff, but if you don't care about Cathar beliefs or the Benedictine Rule or the education of canon lawyers, you will find yourself caring about all these things by the time the books are finished!) For me — a lifelong atheist, raised by atheists (one of whom who was himself raised by atheists, so I'm not even culturally religious in the most superficial sense, except insofar as I grew up in a very secular culturally Christian country) — these books offered one of the clearest articulations of genuine religious faith that I've ever encountered. All of the four mentor/mentee characters — Roland, Pagan, Isidore, and Babylonne — are completely sincere in their diverse beliefs, and they live in a time which is general portrayed in popular culture as populated by people whose religious observance was unthinking, easy, and unburdened by any shades of grey. But this is not true of any of them: they are (other than Babylonne) medieval Catholic clergy whose beliefs are underpinned by a very real understanding of human flaws and frailty, by the knowledge that their world is one where the strong and powerful are encouraged to exploit the weak, and who judge people's hearts not by the orthodoxy of their practice, but by their deeds, and the effects of those deeds.
If there's one thing none of the characters have any patience for, however, it's incompetence and hypocrisy — and worst of all is incompetent hypocrisy! They are infinitely patient with people who are hurt and afraid, and save the full weight of their scorn for those abusing their positions of unearned authority. (Hilariously, in fact, I saw a scathing one-star review of Pagan's Crusade on Goodreads which castigated the book for Pagan being so contemptuous of authority! Which of course entirely missed the point — the entire point of these books is that the characters come to learn that authority must be earned, and that claimants to authority must be subject to vigorous scrutiny.)
Above all, though, these books gave me my lifelong love of stories of dispossessed, traumatised, exiled characters finding home, family and healing in each other. They gave me exactly what I wanted: characters who find themselves in exile (either in a political/geographical sense due to war, or in a psychological sense due to a lack of identification with the values of the families of their birth), and who build a home and sense of purpose within that exilic space. It is one, long, forty-year saga of found family and emotional hurt/comfort, and it gave me my lifelong love of those tropes. I've been seeking them out in fiction ever since — and every so often, I return to their source, the Pagan Chronicles, the well for me which never runs dry.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-18 09:17 am (UTC)One caveat: I first read these books when I was eleven years old, and although I've been rereading them for decades now, I find it very hard to be objective about them. I often find it very frustrating to read fiction that touches on my own academic areas of expertise (I have a PhD in medieval Irish literature, so any fantasy fiction that is 'Celtic' inspired, is about druids, or deals with completely inaccurate representations of so-called 'Celtic Christianity' makes me flee for the hills). So while I love the Pagan books and feel that they get the mood and feel right and do a good job depicting twelfth/thirteenth-century intellectual culture and religious controversies, your mileage may vary.
I say this not to put you off (I love these books! Now let me tell you everything that is wrong with them!), but because when I love something so intensely, it's sometimes hard to think clearly about it. Taste is so personal, and I've certainly had the opposite experience, where someone has passionately recommended one of their favourite books, only for it to leave me cold and make me feel bad that I didn't react in the way the recommending person had wanted. So consider this comment my blanket permission to read these books and not enjoy them!
no subject
Date: 2020-05-18 09:28 pm (UTC)I've mostly worked on hymnals and hagiography from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, so I think I probably know little enough about the particular controversies not to be too bothered.
I definitely know the feeling of loving a book so much that it's difficult to think about objectively - for me it's Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, which I also read for the first time at eleven and periodically reread.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-19 08:55 am (UTC)Hymnals and hagiography do not come up except in the most tangential way in the Pagan Chronicles, so you're probably safe there!
Books like that — that you encounter as a child and just somehow seep into your bones — are amazing, but, as you say, very hard to think about objectively. I just know what it's like to have someone breathlessly recommend their favourite thing, and then find it underwhelming — it always makes me feel bad, so I thought I'd head any such problems in that regard off at the pass.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-19 06:37 pm (UTC)The presentations ran long and there was no time for questions, but I wasn't the only person who had been chomping at the bit to get at this presenter!
I'm a classicist by training, and I can speak, read, and write in Latin; I've noticed that an unfortunately large portion of medievalists who work primarily in the vernacular, though, know a little Latin and think that is about as much as anyone knows. On the way to Kalamazoo, a friend actually warned me that, in his words, "a lot of medievalists don't know Latin as well as they think they do" - I didn't believe him at the time, but I certainly did by the end of the conference!
I appreciate the permission to dislike, so to speak. They're on my list to read as soon as I can get my hands on a copy!
no subject
Date: 2020-05-20 02:08 pm (UTC)In my experience, there are numerous medievalists who have limited language skills — not just in Latin, but also in the vernacular languages they work with, and in modern non-English languages. For example, as a Celticist it's useful to have a working knowledge of Modern Irish and/or Modern Welsh, and German and French — otherwise it limits you in terms of the scholarship you're able to read. My former department (I'm not an academic any more) really emphasises language proficiency and makes it very easy for its students to gain high levels of fluency in all relevant languages, but not all medieval studies programmes do so.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-21 01:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-05-21 10:34 am (UTC)