Book Review: Lovesong (1996) by Geraldine McCaughrean

I've read four of McCaughrean's novels so far this year and at this point I'm just going to declare that she's the best living writer I can think of. Her writerly talents are, well, obscene. She can toss off more brilliant metaphors and similes on a single page than most writers can muster in an entire novel, and her storytelling imagination is fully the equal of her other skills. She's so good I actually find it a bit odd that she hasn't attracted more critical attention. One possible reason is that most of her output has been for the kids' lit and young adult market, and I think big time reviewers and critics are probably loath to take heed of someone who doesn't write for the grownups. Jealousy may also be part of the equation. I barely count as a writer, but I'm jealous that one individual should be so supremely gifted, so I can only imagine what the average professional writer thinks of a person who can apparently toss off sublime prose every time she puts her fingers on a keyboard.

Lovesong is one of a handful of adult novels McCaughrean has written. It's set in France and the Middle East during the last half of the 12th century and is described as a novel of "courtly love," which is rather like calling The Iliad a story about a package tour to Turkey. The French nobility in the 12th century was in the throes of an obsession with knight-troubadours and the formalities and demands of courtly love. As McCaughrean makes clear, it was a highly ritualized game or cult that was neither courtly nor loving. Her main characters are Amaury and Foulque, knight-troubadours; Oriole, a jongleur (a poet) in the employ of Amaury; and Ouallada, Oriole's daughter who eventually becomes a jongleuse. The story covers everything from the Crusades to tragic love affairs to mad nobles to the slaughter of the Cathars, and there are healthy helpings of violence, intrigue, sex, exotic locales, and lots of stomach-churning detail about the grimness of life in the Middle Ages.

The heart of the novel is the long and tortured relationship between Foulque and Ouallada. The sub-plots that spin off from their relationship are multitudinous, but to keep things simple just imagine Foulque as Mr Rochester and Ouallada as Jane Eyre. But don't let that comparison make you think that this novel is basically a historical romance. McCaughrean tackles some weighty themes in Lovesong, chiefly the idea that love and faith are blind. She doesn't, however, take a sentimental view of this kind of faith . Blind love and faith in this world leads to harrowing examples of violence and betrayal. McCaughrean would explore the idea of blind faith even more thoroughly in Not the End of the World (2004), a young adult book that takes a hyper-realistic look at the Noah's Ark myth. In Lovesong, religion and the informal institution of courtly love are used as pretexts for astonishing crimes; for furthering the interests of the ruling classes; and for asserting the dominance of men over women.

As excellent as Lovesong is, it does go on just a tad too long. Ouallada and Foulque get kicked in the shins by Fate and History so many times it's a wonder they can walk, and the fact that it takes Foulque forever to notice that Ouallada is in love with him defies logic. Similarly, Foulque's infatuation with Aude, a shallow but beautiful noble, really only makes sense as a plot device. Even with these minor deficiencies Lovesong is still one of the very best historical novels you'll ever find.

Related posts:

Book Review: Not the End of the World
Book Review: Pull Out All the Stops!
Book Review: The Death Defying Pepper Roux 

Book Review: Partitions (2011) by Amit Majmudar

Over the short lifetime of this blog I've frequently touted Rafik Schami (my reviews here, here and here) as a writer whose fiction provides some background to the whys and wherefores of the Arab Spring. Majmudar does something in a similar vein in Partitions, a novel about the cruel, chaotic and bloody division of Imperial India into three separate countries in 1947. Majmudar's novel isn't political in tone or outlook, but the horrors he so artfully describes go a long way to explaining the past and current tensions between India and Pakistan.

Partitions is plotted like a thriller and written like an epic poem. The novel follows four individuals caught up in the two-way exodus that preceded the creation of Pakistan. Muslims are heading west to resettle in land that will become Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs are fleeing east to India. All the refugees are preyed upon by murderous sectarian mobs, as are those who choose to stay on the wrong side of the border. Hundreds of thousands of people would eventually be killed in the upheavals surrounding Partition. The four people at the centre of the novel are Masud, a Muslim doctor; Simran, a Sikh teenage girl; and two Hindu boys, Keshav and Shankar.

All four characters face death on more than one occasion, and their progress to safety is fraught with tension and harrowing episodes of violence. It's in this regard that Partitions reads like a thriller: characters are left in cliffhanger situations and frequently leap from the frying pan into the fire. The novel has an epic poem quality thanks to the author's audacious decision to make his narrator a ghost. Yes, a ghost. The spirit is that of Dr. Jaitly, the father of Keshav and Shankar. He died months before Partition and he now watches over events, flitting from place to place like a Greek god in The Iliad to observe events and, on occasion, to make ineffectual attempts to intervene in the life and death struggles he witnesses.

Majmudar's decision to make the narrator a ghost is a bold one. Some readers are going to find that this is a distracting or ridiculous narrative device, but I think his intention is to give the novel a voice of humanity and empathy that's divorced from a sectarian viewpoint. Jaitly the ghost sees horrors in a way that Jaitly the mortal would never be able to. Having a ghost as a narrator also lends itself to Majmudar's finely crafted prose. Majmudar is a poet as well, and it shows in sentences like this one describing Masud standing beside a column of refugees:

The family is staring at him. A gentleman heron perfectly still against a background of shuffling migration.

Jaitly has an impressionistic view of what goes around him, conveying violence and distress and hatred with finely-formed, terse descriptions that seem all the more powerful for being brief. Another writer might have gone for lengthy, gritty descriptions of the various horrors of  Partition, but the economical, poetic approach seems to work better in this case. And on a purely aesthetic level there's no disputing that Majmudar is fine writer.

The only problem I had with Partitions is that the ending brings together the four characters in a symbolically convenient manner that's a bit too cozy and predictable. That aside, Partitions is yet another world-class novel from the Indian sub-continent. In the last few years just about every novel I've read from that region has been better than the last. Here are my reviews of novels by Manu Joseph and Yasmine Gooneratne, and although I haven't reviewed it yet, I have to mention Sujit Saraf's The Peacock Throne, which may have to rate as the Great Indian Novel.