By Helen Elliott
HISTORICAL FICTION
Rapture
Emily Maguire
Allen & Unwin ($34.99)
You should always judge a book by its cover; and look, just look at the cover of Emily Maguire’s new novel. The gilded letters of the title Rapture are pricked from a seduction of flowers, oranges, lemons; warbling birds (if you concentrate you’ll hear them) and some daintily vigorous blossoms. And there, perfectly, alarmingly centred is an eye. It’s encircled by gold filigree and it is looking directly at you, drawing you into this long-ago tale.
The eye belongs to Agnes, the daughter of a former cleric known in their city, Mainz, as the English Priest. This is the ninth century and the English Priest had landed in the Frankish countries “finding souls for God and King Charles, saving generations of Saxon babes from lives spent worshipping rocks and afterlives of eternal torment”.
His daughter is the result (probably) of his casual rape of the most beautiful girl in the village, whom he hastily married. The beautiful girl dies in childbirth but the infant lives, blessed with her father’s intellect - and his looks. From her mother she inherited something unshakably Pagan.
Maguire sweeps us into the old legend that there was once a girl of astonishing learning who, for a few years in the ninth century, became Pope of the Holy Roman Empire. In Maguire’s telling, she is called Pope John the English. It is all conjecture and gossip, as legend should be, and serious scholars turn up their noses, but Maguire’s bravura skills energise this dusty tale. Is there nothing on earth she does not find interesting enough to polish into life?
Agnes is inconsequential. She is a girl, and valueless because she is no beauty, so she hangs about at the table of the fine house her father maintains (by mysterious means) in the town. Mainz is large and important and attracts learned men from all over the Christian world and Agnes absorbs their talk, every word, picking up languages, re-thinking discussions. She also reads and writes. Her father accepts her brilliance, and although he treats her with brutality, he can’t help talking with her, teaching such a mind. Soon she outstrips him in learning but understands very well that she must keep this to herself, just as she keeps close her other observations of the external world, things she cannot explain or argue through.
Emily Maguire’s Rapture takes us to the ninth century.Credit: Sarah Wilson
She realises that “men say one thing with their mouths while their bodies said another thing altogether.” At 12, she is destined for marriage, but she knows she will never marry, believing that God will set her on the path He has chosen for her, not one of a maid and wife, nor a servile nun, but something unknown. She has also seen what childbirth does to women. At the centre of her life is her radiant certainty of God.
And then she is 16, managing her father’s household, now often bored by the men’s talk. And Brother Randulf, with russet curls and a bearing belonging to an adventurer but not a priest, walks through the door. Agnes cannot speak. Or stand. Her rapture is sexual but, for all her brilliance, all her intense education, she is as innocent as the morning; she has no knowledge or understanding of what is happening to her.
That night the plain girl and the beautiful man start a conversation that is never to end. The rapture, of the soul as well of the body, is mutual and over the next year Randulf returns as often as he can to Mainz. Randulf, a scholar, a man who never wanted to forgo the world to be a brother, travels the globe in search of manuscripts for the important abbey at Fulda. Everything he learns he brings back to Agnes, the greatest gift. But the world, the ordinary chaos of kings and plagues, is in upheaval and life is precarious. At 18 Agnes, disguised as a lay brother, travels back to Fulda with him. Agnes vanishes and she becomes Brother John, later on the famous Brother John whose learning astonishes the world.
Maguire imagines the grind and dirt, the smells and repulsiveness of daily life in a monastery where more than half the inhabitants are illiterate and many, like Randulf, are prisoners of vows not made by them but for them. The church is powerful, violent, brutal. But Maguire also imagines and defines the magnificence some individuals found/find in faith, art, learning, music. And sex, for that matter.
She has a mastery over her narrative so that we believe in and delight in this implausible story about a woman, a non-person, becoming Pope, of living entirely in a male world, of never being out of disguise as a man, of no one guessing her secret. As Agnes, she was powerless, as Brother John she understands power and uses it well. Rapture is a novel as absorbing, as educative and as thoughtful as the promise of Sandy Cull’s cover.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.