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Publication
Carroll & Graf Publishers (1988), Paperback
Description
In sixth century Gaul, nuns become involved the political intrigues of the day.
Media reviews
Warning: full review contains massive spoilers.
But there is another way of looking at history, one that becomes fiercer and wilder the further back you go; one that says that people in the past, thanks to radically different physical, political, religious and cultural situations, may be almost
O'Faolain's book is a remarkable example of this. Its original Guardian reviewer may have called it "urbane", but for me the world she writes about outside the convent gates is almost feral. Her language is peppered with images and metaphors of decay and darkness, and nature, sometimes benign but often vicious, dominates. Life is wartorn and precarious, the roads littered with bodies, rotten or rotting, "pagan shrines surrounded by every sort of idolatrous rubbish, including some stinking horses' heads set on poles and picked at by daws". The traveller who sees this arrives at the convent gates "pale as a parsnip and gaunt as a cormorant".
But there is another way of looking at history, one that becomes fiercer and wilder the further back you go; one that says that people in the past, thanks to radically different physical, political, religious and cultural situations, may be almost
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unrecognisable to their modern counterparts. In this version of the past, historical novels have something in common with the best of science fiction and a creation of a world that is coherent, satisfyingly detailed, yet imaginatively strange and challenging.O'Faolain's book is a remarkable example of this. Its original Guardian reviewer may have called it "urbane", but for me the world she writes about outside the convent gates is almost feral. Her language is peppered with images and metaphors of decay and darkness, and nature, sometimes benign but often vicious, dominates. Life is wartorn and precarious, the roads littered with bodies, rotten or rotting, "pagan shrines surrounded by every sort of idolatrous rubbish, including some stinking horses' heads set on poles and picked at by daws". The traveller who sees this arrives at the convent gates "pale as a parsnip and gaunt as a cormorant".
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Subjects
Language
Physical description
8.48 inches
ISBN
088184442X / 9780881844429