Books like Jerusalem

This book is billed as a ‘homage to P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975)’. Anyone who enjoys Wodehouse’s numerous comic novels and short stories will not be disappointed with Faulk’s tribute. It features Wodehouse’s two most famous characters, the bumbling aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his highly intelligent manservant, Jeeves. All the usual escapades are there, as well as Jeeves cryptic allusions to English literature that, of course, go way over Wooster’s head. This book is more than just mimicry though. Somehow or other, Faulks manages to mirror Wodehouse impeccably and yet keep his own authorial voice. Ask me for a specific example and I cannot give it. As with a conjuror, you know it’s not magic but you still cannot work out how they do it. Faulks is simply a master of language who knows exactly what words to put where.

The old adage that you cannot judge a book by its cover certainly works for this one: It features a simpering blonde in a dodgy crown and the words ‘Her beauty fuelled a war. Her courage captured a king’. Hickson’s novel is so much better than that. Catherine of Valois, the future wife of Henry V of England, and her faithful servant Mette, live through the dangerous and uncertain years following the catastrophic French defeat at Agincourt in 1415. Mette is Hickson’s own creation, constructed from a passing mention of a retainer called ‘Guillemot’ in a contemporary English chronicle. She narrates the story of her mistress’ travails and somehow the reader is made to care about their fate in a way that is rare in historical fiction. There is a sequel, The Tudor Bride (Harper, 2014).

I was drawn to this book, a ripping and irreverent yarn about Vikings, by the foreword to its new edition written by Michael Chabon.

Our sea-faring hero finds himself in endless scrapes everywhere a Viking ship could go, often brought about by his own foolishness. Of special note are his adventures in Islamic Spain.

And I discovered as I was writing this recommendation that the novel was (sort of) made into a 1964 movie, a British-Yugoslav coproduction starring, among others, Sidney Poitier. You’ve got to love that.

It is difficult to imagine a list of great novels about the Middle Ages that does not include this book.

I read it first when I was in graduate school, and it brought so much of what I was studying to life – the monastic world of its setting with all its contradictions and spectacular architecture; fights over religion and the true nature of spirituality; the non-linear nature of medieval literature. 

I love how it can be read on one level as a page-turny murder mystery and on another as a post-modern novel that explores the nature of signs and meaning. Its mystificatory preface reveals the distance between the medieval world and what we can say about it.

I devoured this book in a weekend.

Hild plunged me into the rough and tumble world of seventh-century Anglo-Saxon England through the eyes of its title character, a young woman with unusual abilities who is dangerously close to the crown of one of its kings and who protects herself by becoming his seer.

I appreciated how Griffith evoked the texture of life in this period, its beauty and its roughness, bringing me into its mead halls and forests and onto its sea cliffs. She also draws out the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Anglo-Saxon world and the conflicts this created between Celts and Saxons, mixed with pressure from Franks across the Channel and the Latin Church in Rome.

This book is part of Dorothy Dunnett’s House of Niccolò series, about merchants and trade in the fifteenth century and I love the whole series for its focus on commerce and goods – commodities like sugar, cloth, dyestuffs, and whale oil – and its scope, taking us from Bruges to Italy, Cyprus and Rhodes, Trebizond in the Black Sea, Egypt, Iceland, and beyond.

I chose this particular book in the series because of its unusual focus on the gold trade in Africa, and the cultured Islamic intellectual world of Timbuktu, just before it fell to the Songhai Empire. Written about the world before the Age of Exploration, it made vivid to me the forces that promoted conquest, colonization, and exploitation that led to the voyages of Columbus and others.

I like historical novels with strong female characters, even unsympathetic ones (maybe especially unsympathetic ones), but if I am not going to throw the book against the wall, their lives and values need to be true to those of their time.

The Maria of the title is one of the best examples I know of a slightly difficult and strong-minded woman who is fully a product of her world, in this case, the world of Norman adventurers of the eleventh century who carved out domains for themselves in southern Italy against opposition from Muslims and the pope in Rome.

Her life is constrained by the expectations of her class and gender and a marriage she does not want, but she is a survivor, and she finds her own way to exert power.