fiction

The Normans: From Raiders to Kings, by Lars Brownworth

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I’ve recently taken a little detour into the Middle Ages, starting with Helen Hollick’s The Kingmaking, a well-researched novel about Arthur Pendragon’s rise to power in 5th century Britain. Then I jumped ahead to the 12th-15th centuries, viewing a four-part series hosted by historian Dan Jones called Britain’s Bloodiest Dynasty: The Plantagenets.

I also read Judith Merkle Riley’s witty novel, The Master of All Desires, about a young woman who finds herself at the center of Queen Catherine de Medici’s intrigues at the French Court and looks to the Queen’s Astrologer, Nostradamus, for advice. The story is set in the 16th century, thus putting it over the historians’ line and into the Renaissance, although the reliance on seers and spells seems more apt for the Middle Ages.

Finally I tackled this book on the Normans, set in the 11th and 12th centuries. It is relatively short at a little over 200 pages and immensely readable. Maps, family trees, descriptive lists of people and places, and endnotes explaining possibly unfamiliar terms, make this history accessible for a reader with little or no foreknowledge while not boring one who knows quite a bit about the Normans already.

I knew that the Normans who invaded Britain came from—surprise!—Normandy and were descended from Viking raiders who’d settled there in the 9th and 10th centuries. I knew about the Battle of Hastings and have my list of English monarchs well situated in memory.

What I didn’t know was that the Normans played a huge role in the rest of Europe, creating kingdoms as far south as North Africa, going on crusades, and taking on the Papal States, the Holy Roman Empire (aka the German Empire) and the Byzantine Empire. And that much of that was accomplished by members of a single family, the de Hautevilles.

The question Brownworth sets out to answer is: “How did Western Europe, which was militarily, technologically, and socially far behind its immediate neighbors in the Middle East, manage not only to catch up with them, but to rise to global dominance?”

He finds much of the answer in the Normans. Without downplaying their ruthless suppression of local languages and customs, he does explain how they eventually assimilated with their conquered peoples. While some of the Normans he describes were warriors first and last, others actually found creative ways to govern, becoming respected and even beloved.

Still, the net result for me of all this reading and viewing was a sickening sense of the brevity of life in the Middle Ages, not only for the conquered peasantry and the waves of warriors thrown at various foes, but for the rulers themselves. Intrigue is too mild a word for the fostering of revolts in a brother’s country, the poisonings and outright murders. And then there were the frail, inbred children placed on thrones, controlled or fought over by power-hungry nobles.

None of this was new to me, but the span of this little detour of mine showed how prevalent it was. Yet another person murdering all of his brothers to gain a throne, in turn murdered by another claimant. Over and over.

In this season of the U.S. presidential election, a time I loathe, one that has me avoiding the saturated media, I actually found the slaughter of the Middle Ages comforting. Yes, the airwaves are dominated by amoral pretenders, each trying to stir up more hatred than the next, making the U.S. a laughingstock in the international arena where people cannot believe such clowns could even be considered for office. But at least they are not killing each other. At least they are not cooking up charges to have each other’s entrails dragged out or having their opponents beheaded or poisoned or burned at the stake. And this season, at least, there are a few who are refraining from even verbal attacks in favor of—shocking as it may be—a discussion of the issues.

I will take comfort where I can find it.

What do you know of the Normans’ involvement in the Crusades?

Harvest, by Jim Crace

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Two fires disrupt harvest time in an isolated village, one on a nearby hill where some outsiders have camped and the other at Master Kent’s dovecot, which rapidly spreads to a barn. The latter is a bit of mischief by a couple of village lads that got out of hand, while the former “says, New neighbors have arrived; they’ve built a place; they’ve laid a hearth; they know the custom and the law. This first smoke has given them the right to stay. We’ll see.”

The narrator, Walter Thirsk, arrived with Master Kent as his manservant, when Kent came to the village to marry the daughter of the Old Master. Since then Walter has immersed himself in village life, working in the common fields with his neighbours, dancing to the pipe and fiddle, observing the age-old traditions of harvest followed by gleaning and the choosing of the Gleaning Queen to pick the first grain.

The two fires are only a foretaste of the changes coming to Walter’s village, a place where nothing has changed for as long as anyone can remember. There is the presence of an oddly shaped man who draws maps of Master Kent’s property, followed more ominously by Edmund Jordan, cousin to the late Mrs. Kent, who is laying claim to the property with the intention of enclosing the fields for sheep.

This richly detailed story immerses us in village life. Although a time period is not specified, it is most likely the late 18th century. The appearance of the strangers, most likely thrown off their land when the fields were enclosed, and the remoteness of Walter’s village lead me to think it is towards the end of the period of wholesale enclosure. Although I’ve read and thought about the changes—both good and bad—that followed in the wake of enclosure, I’ve learned a great deal from this book. It brought home to me what could likely happen during the process itself, the building distrust, the blaming of others.

It is a beautiful and disturbing book. It gripped my entire attention, immersing me in a way of life that vanished centuries ago. The portrait of that life that emerges is different from the Merrie England stereotype of singing ploughboys, an idyll of pastoral life before the Industrial Revolution swept the ploughboys and everyone else into the factories. There has been little to counteract this nostalgic view until recently when historians have begun examining the meager scrapings left behind by ordinary people, those outside the halls of power.

There is much here that speaks to our own time: the fear of change, the scapegoating of foreigners, the origins of our increasingly itinerant culture and its hordes of displaced people. Most disturbing to me is, as always, how easy it is to sway people. Walter says, “We’ve been ashamed, I think. And bewildered, truth be told. Bewildered by ourselves. These are not the customary village ways.”

I find myself thinking about how you can spend years making a place for yourself and still be an outsider. Although Walter has lived now in the village for many years and married and buried one of its daughters, he is still considered a foreigner.

As my friend Laura, who gave me this book, observed, these are the effects of isolation. It is no surprise that, as Robert Reich said in a May 25 2014 Facebook post, “Liberalism thrives near oceans and major ports; conservatism is mainly inland (the same holds true for other nations and on other continents as well), because each depends on the amount of contact with others who are different. Lots of interaction with differing cultures, religions, and points of view – such as is typically the case in coastal regions with major ports – generates looser rules and greater tolerance; less interaction means tighter rules and less tolerance.”

I agree. But this is also why I've made reading and writing the core of my life because they open our lives to each other. Through literature we can directly experience another person's life, which helps us develop empathy.

What book has most disturbed you?

Eventide, by Kent Haruf

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I’ve been judging a novel contest lately, reading the first 20-30 pages of a slew of novels. They’ve been mostly historical fiction, a rather wide category but still surprisingly over-represented in this particular sample. Is the past somehow more romantic than the present? More urgent? I’ve certainly read and enjoyed my share of historical fiction, but generally look for novels written in the author’s present-day, expecting to get a more accurate flavor of the time. And anyway, whatever we write about today will soon enough become part of history. I’m occasionally surprised by how dated some novels written only ten years ago seem to me now.

Back to the contest, though. Some of the novels obviously came from the pens (or PCs) of writers still learning their craft, forcing me to find ways to offer advice without inflicting too much pain. Other entries were more accomplished. Much to my surprise, I could tell this was so within the first paragraph. Later, trying to pinpoint what tipped me off, I realised that I had relaxed. I felt comfortable falling into the story, able to trust that the author would not let me down.

As diverse as these novels were—good/bad, historical/present-day, thrillers, romances, mysteries, chick lit, humor—they had one thing in common: they started with a bang. Not literally, of course, but in media res, with action or strong emotion, some catalyst to set the story in motion. This is what writers these days are instructed to do.

Then we have Kent Haruf. Eventide starts slowly, gently. The aging McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond, come up from the horse barn and wipe their feet before going in for a breakfast prepared by Victoria, a nineteen-year-old single mom they’d taken in a few years earlier. The scenes are set with leisurely details, describing their boots, the screened porch, the kitchen, the men, their steady routine. This is the day that they are driving Victoria and her little daughter to Fort Collins where the young woman is starting college.

In the next chapter we meet Betty June, putting her two children on the schoolbus. Betty and her husband, Luther, are mentally challenged, struggling to care for their children in a world that seems to them both baffling and hostile. Their social worker, Rose, offers help and advice, but she herself is sometimes overwhelmed by the cumulative weight of the many difficult situations her various clients find themselves in.

In the third chapter, we meet DJ, an undersized fifth-grader living with and caring for his 75-year-old grandfather, a retired gandy dancer on the railroad. DJ accompanies his grandfather on his monthly visits to the tavern so he could walk him home safely after celebrating the arrival of his pension check. DJ works on his homework while his grandfather visits with the other old men, telling “stories that were not exaggerated so much as they were simply enlarged a little.”

We follow these plain, good people as they pursue their lives in and around the town of Holt, Colorado. They endure the disappointments, losses, and small joys of everyday life. They drift apart and come together. The prose, too, is plain and good, the dialogue hinting at the accents and speech patterns of rural Colorado.

After the first three or four pages, I thought I was going to be bored out of my mind by this quiet novel, but once I adjusted and learned how to read it, I treasured each chapter, each page. I was touched, recognising again the generosity most people demonstrate toward those around them, how gentle they can be with each other. This story about how we connect with each other and how painful it is when those connections are severed served for me as a good corrective for all the hateful politics filling the airwaves, fear-fueled rantings against some imagined “other”. It also served to remind me that there are no rules for writing novels that cannot be broken by a good writer.