Monday 12 August 2013

Pavane - Keith Roberts

Well here's a book which genuinely surprised me. I imagined this would be a heavy-on-exposition exploration of the effects of a huge cause - the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I. What this actually is is a beautifully crafted exploration of this strange version of the alternate late-20th century using richly, thoughtfully and humanely created characters who allow you glimpses of the rest of the world from a small corner of an England (Angle-Land) occupied by a militant, controlling and constricting Roman Catholic empire. As brush strokes lend humanity to a scene un-framed in standard vision, so does Roberts' observation and craft lend life to this bizarre reality. Without his calm and steady hand, this interlinked collection of stories could have been hackneyed, schmaltzy or even boring. His painterly prose are like individual flames lending art to the heat of fire; they mesmerise whilst they sustain.

I found myself reading and re-reading passages just to have his imagery re-form in my head.

Roberts' skill doesn't end simply with his style of prose. The stories told here expertly illustrate and animate a world seemingly trapped under a millennium-long dictatorship, actually on the verge of all-out change and revolution. This revolution is not introduced with chauvinist bombast, flag waving or hill-top speeches though. It is allowed, with the patience of someone truly confident in his material (and materiel), to seep into your mind through implication before its ultimate reveal, and even that reveal is merely a beginning, a jumping-off point. No one of the characters is a Hero, and no one is born with a manifest destiny, or a vengeance or even so much as a steely eye towards justice. They are humans; agents of circumstance. They are us, and because of that novels like this are so desperately important.

And you are not a hero, this novel will tell you. You are never completely correct in your prejudices. Roberts toys with our need to sort people into heroes and villains, sort plots into good versus evil. But his revelations towards the end of the book, that evil perhaps must exist to warn us against worse mistakes, are truly sobering.

We must always fight for Humanity, and our humanity, but an essential part of that fight is keeping watch on our past, and never mistaking the urge for vengeance for the urge to force good into the world and bad out. This novel will always be prescient.

 

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