Entry tags:
The Habitation of the Blessed
Valente, Catherynne M. The Habitation of the Blessed. San Francisco: Nightshade Books, 2010.
The Letter of Prester John has to be one of the most famous and influential hoaxes in history. Briefly, in the middle of the 12th century, the Emperor in Constantinople received a most singular letter from a man who claimed to be the priest-king of a fabulous realm in the East, which as all good Christians know is where the Apostle Doubting Thomas the Twin disappeared on his quest to convert people, greeting his fellow monarch and promising him riches while handily implying that he, Prester John, was a Nestorian. The letter was a fake from start to finish, but the legend of Prester John inspired Christian questors for centuries, until the world was girdled and there was no more empty space on the map, or belief that a mythical Christian realm could fill it.
This novel takes the opposite premise: what if the letter were true, what if the fabulous realm it described did in fact exist?
The novel is framed by the tale of Brother Hiob of Luzerne in 1699, whose missionary work in the Himalaya in 1699 brings him into contact with a tree guarded by a woman in yellow which bears book-fruit. Hiob is permitted to take three books, and struggles to recopy them before book-mould devours them. The first is the tale of John himself, a ragged, cowardly pilgrim unfortunately convinced that he is a good man and that Christianity is the one truth faith. The second is the tale of his future wife Hagia, a blemmye who is first a scribe and then a queen, and her life in the fantastic realm of Pentexore, where every three hundred years the immortal denizens of the realm put off their lives and relationships by a Lottery and don new ones as you or I might change shirts. The third takes place many centuries earlier and is the collected stories of the panoti Imtithal, royal nursemaid and sometime companion of Doubting Thomas himself. All three stories are connected in ways that would spoil the lovely, rich delights of this book and of Valente's prose.
It may be that other people who do not have the same educational background as Valente and I (like her I am a lapsed classicist, though I ended my formal training in a B.A., while she left without finishing her master's) do not find so much of this book as darkly ironic and hilariously pointed as I do. A peacock historian, whose latest turn in the Lottery has forced him to work as a novelist, writes the story of the Fourth Crusade. The Anti-Aristotle is known to everyone and everything he wrote was true (things you plant in the ground do bear fruit, be they people or handsaws); additionally, he was a lion. Prester John has a long argument about the truth of God and the universe with a flock of sheep who are now a tree:
Maybe it's only because I've done my time in the Aristotle mines, in two languages ("a pagan, yes, but hardly a man alive has constructed more maddening sentences" (140)), but holy crap I laughed like a hyena when I read that one. As funny as it is, though, the nature of God is very much a live question in this book, and one suspects even more so in the next two. John being a Nestorian Christian, in flight from the iconoclasts, matters rather a lot, and of course if Alexander the Great can reach the land of Pentexore, and save it from Gog and Magog, less legendary armies may reach the land, and be mustered there, as well. But in this book, the empire is not yet Prester John's realm and its inhabitants are fully themselves, wise, courteous, kind, free, and if I am making this book sound dry or academic I am doing Valente and the story a great disservice.
This is not a premise I have seen much explored in fiction, except from Umberto Eco's Baudolino, which I read for my medieval Latin class in college and which, I think, has one significant advantage over Valente, in that Eco can flawlessly mimic the medieval mindset, whereas my one problem with this book is that, as![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks pointed out in this review last year, the monks of the frame tale simply don't read as being from 1699--they are too piously unmodern, although Valente gets in several grimly humorous cracks about colonialism that I appreciated. This is a minor complaint, assuredly, and more importantly John himself, who cannot see the riches of the country around him for the pains of his faith, is all too real. Unsurprisingly I liked Hagia and Imtithal and their stories better, although I cannot fathom Hagia's love for the priest. All that being said, I'm very much looking to the next book, The Folded World.
And here, have the book trailer, because it's awesome.
The Letter of Prester John has to be one of the most famous and influential hoaxes in history. Briefly, in the middle of the 12th century, the Emperor in Constantinople received a most singular letter from a man who claimed to be the priest-king of a fabulous realm in the East, which as all good Christians know is where the Apostle Doubting Thomas the Twin disappeared on his quest to convert people, greeting his fellow monarch and promising him riches while handily implying that he, Prester John, was a Nestorian. The letter was a fake from start to finish, but the legend of Prester John inspired Christian questors for centuries, until the world was girdled and there was no more empty space on the map, or belief that a mythical Christian realm could fill it.
This novel takes the opposite premise: what if the letter were true, what if the fabulous realm it described did in fact exist?
The novel is framed by the tale of Brother Hiob of Luzerne in 1699, whose missionary work in the Himalaya in 1699 brings him into contact with a tree guarded by a woman in yellow which bears book-fruit. Hiob is permitted to take three books, and struggles to recopy them before book-mould devours them. The first is the tale of John himself, a ragged, cowardly pilgrim unfortunately convinced that he is a good man and that Christianity is the one truth faith. The second is the tale of his future wife Hagia, a blemmye who is first a scribe and then a queen, and her life in the fantastic realm of Pentexore, where every three hundred years the immortal denizens of the realm put off their lives and relationships by a Lottery and don new ones as you or I might change shirts. The third takes place many centuries earlier and is the collected stories of the panoti Imtithal, royal nursemaid and sometime companion of Doubting Thomas himself. All three stories are connected in ways that would spoil the lovely, rich delights of this book and of Valente's prose.
It may be that other people who do not have the same educational background as Valente and I (like her I am a lapsed classicist, though I ended my formal training in a B.A., while she left without finishing her master's) do not find so much of this book as darkly ironic and hilariously pointed as I do. A peacock historian, whose latest turn in the Lottery has forced him to work as a novelist, writes the story of the Fourth Crusade. The Anti-Aristotle is known to everyone and everything he wrote was true (things you plant in the ground do bear fruit, be they people or handsaws); additionally, he was a lion. Prester John has a long argument about the truth of God and the universe with a flock of sheep who are now a tree:
"And yet, we are talking, you and I," the ram opined, cutting the ewe quite out. "So someone here has Aristotle wrong and I rather think it's the one who thinks God isn't a sheep." (81)
Maybe it's only because I've done my time in the Aristotle mines, in two languages ("a pagan, yes, but hardly a man alive has constructed more maddening sentences" (140)), but holy crap I laughed like a hyena when I read that one. As funny as it is, though, the nature of God is very much a live question in this book, and one suspects even more so in the next two. John being a Nestorian Christian, in flight from the iconoclasts, matters rather a lot, and of course if Alexander the Great can reach the land of Pentexore, and save it from Gog and Magog, less legendary armies may reach the land, and be mustered there, as well. But in this book, the empire is not yet Prester John's realm and its inhabitants are fully themselves, wise, courteous, kind, free, and if I am making this book sound dry or academic I am doing Valente and the story a great disservice.
This is not a premise I have seen much explored in fiction, except from Umberto Eco's Baudolino, which I read for my medieval Latin class in college and which, I think, has one significant advantage over Valente, in that Eco can flawlessly mimic the medieval mindset, whereas my one problem with this book is that, as
rushthatspeaks pointed out in this review last year, the monks of the frame tale simply don't read as being from 1699--they are too piously unmodern, although Valente gets in several grimly humorous cracks about colonialism that I appreciated. This is a minor complaint, assuredly, and more importantly John himself, who cannot see the riches of the country around him for the pains of his faith, is all too real. Unsurprisingly I liked Hagia and Imtithal and their stories better, although I cannot fathom Hagia's love for the priest. All that being said, I'm very much looking to the next book, The Folded World. And here, have the book trailer, because it's awesome.