My life in books

Standard of Honor, Jack Whyte

This, the second volume of Whyte's Templar trilogy, is a most unusual novel.

Despite its 800-plus pages, there's really not much action on the part of the characters. OK, one of the main characters - Alexander Sinclair, Knight of the Temple and secretly a brother of the hidden Order of Sion, survives the battle of the Horns of Hattin at the very beginning, and the other main character, his young cousin André St. Clair, also a brother of the Order of Sion travels from his home in Poitou to the holy Land, becoming a Templar along the way, and ends up witnessing the battle of Arsuf in which Richard Lion-Heart defeated Saladin's army.

But almost all of those 800-plus pages is exposition, description and discussion. We learn a great deal about a great many things: the politics of England, Europe and the Middle East, how to train an army in the use of arbalests and crossbows, how to move a force of 100,000 men from Burgundy to Acre, the personal life of Richard Lion-Heart, and a general picture of the life of a European fighting man in the 12th century. Most of the characters, both major and minor, have a penchant for talking about the political, religious, and moral issues of their time, so we hear a variety of perspectives on such things - some of the most interesting from the viewpoint of Alec Sinclair who has spent much time living among the Arabs of Palestine and has come to see them as humans, rather than heretical demons, with a culture that in some ways is more advanced than that of Europe at the time.

Whyte is a sufficiently good writer, and he weaves these deep conversations so seamlessly into the narrative thread, making them a part of the evolution of young André St. Clair, that all of this talking doesn't stand out - it really isn't until the end that one realises that while not a lot has happened to the characters onscreen, as it were (certainly they are all working very hard, training, marching, sailing, fighting, waiting out sieges and so on during the whole time), one is left with a deep and rich portrait of the Third Crusade itself and the world in which it took place.

One is also treated to a series of very critical discussions of the negative impact of religion, the corruption of power and the horror of war, views which are quite modern in tone but which can be anachronistically voiced by his main characters because of their initiation into the traditions and philosophies of Whyte's mythical secret society, which has matured well beyond its Jewish origins, and because of Alec Sinclair's disillusionment with both Christian and Muslim "men of God" as a result of his time spent among all of the religious factions at play in Palestine of the time - Roman and Orthodox Christians, Sunni and Shi'a Muslims.

It is difficult in these days to read a book that discusses the Crusader experience, the varieties of religious intolerance, and war in Palestine without thinking of recent events in the Middle East and Central Asia, and I personally found it quite relevant to read a book that, despite being on the surface a novel about a mythical society behind the Tamplars, provided a very clear and balanced overview of another time when powers identifying themselves as Christian and Muslim were at war and religion was the ground and standard in that war.

Near the end of the book, André St. Clair addresses the grave in which he has buried his cousin Alec Sinclair and his cousin's friend, Amir al-Farouche, both dead in the battle at Arsuf, just outside Jerusalem:

... And both of you have died in war, fighting against each other for possession of this sacred place, And for what? For honor? Whose honor? Certainly, not God's, or Allah's, or Jehovah's, for the very thought of that is blasphemy. God has no need of man, and honor is a human attribute. for whose honor, then, are these wars waged? And how can there be honor in slaughtering people for the possession of a sacred place?

I can answer that for both of you. There is no honor in this war. There is no honor among kings and princes, popes and patriarchs, caliphs and viziers or whatever else you wish to name as titles. All of those are men, and all of them are venal, greedy, gross and driven by base lusts for power. Ours is the task of fighting for their lusts, and like poor fools, we do it gladly, time and time again, answering the call to duty and lining up to die unnoticed by the very people who sent us out there.

Of late, I have been indulging my fascination with the Matter of Britain, as the body of Arthurian writing is sometimes called.

First, the scholarly works:

The Grail Legend in Modern Literature - John Marino
The Return from Avalon - Raymond H. Thompson

Both books cover similar territory, although with a different focus. Thompson's book is the earlier one (published in 1985), and is a straightforward look at the treatment of Arthurian themes and characters in modern fiction (ca. 1900 - 1985). Thompson, as constant readers may recall, was my advisor and mentor in university, so reading the book was particularly delightful for me, not just becasue of it's insights into the ways that Arthurian material has been incorporated and reinterpreted in modern fiction, but also becasue, well, it's fun reading a book written by someone you know, especially if you enjoy it. One thing that Thompson notes is the veritable explosion of new books with Arthurian themes in the period between 1950 and 1985 - ironically, the most recent book included in his survey is Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon, which if anything accelerated the trend. I find myself wishing that Thompson would publish a revised edition that includes works published between 1985 and the present.

Marino's book focuses on modern fiction (and some other cultural works, including film) that draws on elements of the Grail legend - a significant part of the Matter of Britain, but by no means the largest part. Published in 2004, Marino's analysis of the use of Grail material in modern literature covers a greater time period that Thompson does, but a much narrower focus; there is some overlap in the works discussed, but not enough to make either work secondary to the other. Where Thompson's work is a general analysis and an attempt at producing a taxonomy of modern Arthurian fiction based on content, tone and intent, Marino is more interested in analysing the various examples of Grail-influenced literature in terms of their underlying theological assumptions and premises - is the Grail a real and sacred object? And if so, is it Celtic or Christian? Or is it a symbol of the human spiritual quest? Or something that is both of these, or neither?

Fun reading, both of them - and also excellent bibliographical works that have pointed me to some works of Arthurian-influenced literature that I haven't read, and now see that I simply must add to my library.

I also picked up in recent months a copy of Phyllis Ann Karr's The Arthurian Companion. As it is a reference work, it's hardly appropriate to say I read it, but I've spent a lovely chunk of time wandering through various entries, and I'm glad I have it.

Now, the fiction.

To round out the Arthurian binge, I recently acquired and devoured the final volume of Jack Whyte's historical fiction series about the Arthurian legends.

The Eagle finally gets down to the familiar story of Arthur the King, after so many volumes of building up the setting, brick by brick, from probable historical bases. The stories of Merlin, Uthyr and Lancelot finally come together in this volume, which takes us through, in an interesting choice, to the end of the stories of Lancelot and Guenevere, but leaves the end of Arthur and Mordred shrouded in conflicting rumours and incomplete reports brought across the sea from Britain to France.

Whyte has done something very amusing with his Lancelot character. Whyte's Lancelot is a member of a minor (at the time) royal house of the Salic Franks - his parents, the king and queen of Ganis, are murdered by a usurper named Clodio, and Clothar the Frank, called Lancelot for his skill with a lance, spends most of his life in exile from the tiny kingdom of his birth.

The last half of The Eagle deals with Lancelot's sea voyage to Gaul to establish ties between Arthur and King Pelles of Corbenic - who turns out to be a kinsman of Clothar, and avenger of the murder of his kin - Clothar's parents. Lancelot builds up a military force for Pelles, engages in some warfare with the Hungvari, and ends up living in Benoic, supposedly near modern Geneva, a small kingdom rulled by another royal kinsman, King Brach. There he starts a family with the widowed Gwenifer, and eventually passed Excalibur, which has been in His and Gwenifer's keeping, to his son Clovis.

Now, Clodio was a historical character. His successor, Merowig, is one of those characters about whom history can only conclude that there must have been someone like him, but who he actually was is not so clear. His name probably means travller from the sea. He may or may not have been Clodio's son or close kin. He may or may not have been involved in defeating Attila the Hun's attempt to overrun Gaul. What is known is, that whoever he was, he was the founder of the Merovingian dynasty. (Yes, that Merovingian dynasty.) And Clothar and Clovis (as well as some other names of Lancelot's kin) are names found in the Merovingian line.

Whyte certainly doesn't come out and say that Lancelot, hero of the matter of Britain, (whose main character, Arthur, Whyte has clearly linked historically to the Matter of Rome) is the father of Clovis of the Merovingians, who were eventually succeeded by the Carolingians, whose greatest king Charlemagne is one of the key figures in the third pillar of medieval literature, the Matter of France. but he makes it fun working out the possibilities that his Lancelot could have been.

And what makes this all very amusing, is that at the end of The Eagle, Merlin gives Lancelot/Clothar a package that he says contains documents about the history of Clothar's family, which had been passed on to him by Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, who had been Merlin's long-time friend and mentor, as well as being mentor to Clothar in his youth. Clothar says that he has never opened the package, because it gives him a sense of unease. Now what family secrets of the founder of the Merovingian bloodline might a Roman Catholic bishop have been hiding?

I have been happily re-reading the first few volumes of Jack Whyte's marvelous historically based interpretation of the Arthurian cycle, and am now moving on to read the volumes I had missed reading over the past few years.

Read so far:
The Skystone
The Singing Sword
The Eagle's Brood
The Saxon Shore

Still to be read:
Uther
The Sorcerer: The Fort at River's Bend
The Sorcerer: Metamorphosis
Clothar the Frank
The Eagle

It will probably be a while before I can read the latest book, The Eagle, because it's just out in hardcover and I really can't afford to buy books in hardcover because there are just too many books.



I have enjoyed this series, at least so far, because instead of just picking up the whole Arthur legend in its current formulation and dropping it into somewhere around the "right" historical era, it starts from the political and military situation in Britannia just before the pull-out of the roman legions and tries to develop something that makes sense historically, even if it doesn't have all the "proper" characters playing all the "proper" parts. It will be very interesting to see how the inclusion of the Clothar character (Whyte's analogue of Lancelot) is handled, becasue of course, Lancelot is a relatively late addition to the cycle, added initially by Chrétien de Troyes to make the Matter of Britain interesting to his French audiences.