Customer Reviews

Havoc, in Its Third Year: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Set in the north of England in the early 1630s, this novel artfully captures the political, social, and religious turmoil during the reign of King Charles I. A distant and autocratic king, Charles fails to take into account the enormous religious changes sweeping both Europe and England and undermining his own power. Puritanical grassroots movements have now sprung up, with many local leaders, both religious and civil, calling for reform and purification. John Brigge, a coroner living in the remote countryside, is one of twelve reform-minded governors aiding Nathaniel Challoner, the Master, in his "Revolution of the Saints" and his project to "build a city on the hill."

Though he attends the prescribed protestant church, Brigg is in reality a "papistical malignant," a man who walks the difficult line between the Puritanism of the Master, a lifelong friend, and his belief that "men must have mercy, for without mercy we are savages." When Brigge is suddenly called to conduct an inquest on an infant found dead in a local pub, he discovers that Katherine Shay, a Catholic deemed "prideful, brazen, and uncontrite," has been arrested for the murder.

With numerous subplots and much intrigue, the story of Katherine Shay's arrest and John Brigge's search for justice on her behalf evolves. The period comes to life on every level of society as the author shows in realistic detail the kinds of gruesome punishments meted out for "sins," the harshness of life for the homeless poor, the dependence of farmers on luck and weather, the fragility of life, the excesses of religious extremism, and the abiding power of love. Realistically presented motivations for some of the extreme behavior in the novel make the Puritan characters come alive, as John Brigge, a man who sees more than one side to each issue, becomes a protagonist for whom the reader develops much sympathy.

The elegant and formal language of the novel resembles that of the Bible. Filled with observations of the harsh natural world but revealing the humanity of the main characters, the novel has a rare historical integrity and unity, with poignant applications to the present day. Despite its forbidding subject matter, the novel is exciting--full of well-paced action and suspense. Many characters have biblical parallels, obvious in their names--Elizabeth, Deborah, Starman, and John Brigge, sometimes known as Germanus. The religious parallels are unobtrusive during the body of the novel, but the ending is overtly symbolic and didactic, the book's artistry and elegance subordinated to message, and its thematic balance and restraint sacrificed to an overly obvious, religious conclusion. (4.5 stars) Mary Whipple

The author's setting for this work in early 17th century England. This is a well done piece of historical fiction by any standard. The author has obviously done his research. Because of the time, religion, sin, faith, morals and leadership all come into play. I was struck by the timelessness of this work. When you take a close look at the problems encountered by the primary characters in the book, we find this same theme repeated time and again throughout history, indeed our own history. Many of the incidents taking place here, in 1630 could be ripped from the pages of "Grapes of Wrath." It does not take a great leap to turn on the evening news and catch glipses of the very problems the author addresses here. That being said, I do feel the author's wonderful use of the language, his character development and insight to human character make the book well worth the read. Very much recommend this one. It should make you think!

Knowledge of medieval English history is a boon though not a prequisite for enjoying "Havoc, In Its Third Year", a brilliantly crafted, nominally genred as murder mystery and arguably the best novel to date by Ronan Bennett. The kangaroo trial of Irish woman Katherine Shay for the alleged killing of an infant assumed to be her child is the catalyst that ignites the fire within John Brigge, a coroner and above all a good man, to get to the bottom of the case and see that justice is done even at the cost of his own life and that of his family.

As an Asian reader without any knowledge whatsoever of the politics of the times as between Catholics and Protestants etc, the universality of the novel's theme about the right of an individual to exercise compassion and forgiveness (ie, what it means to be human) is one so powerful as to render any disadvantage from the lack of historical knowledge irrelevant.

It seems too much of a coincidence that in my reading of the book I should be keenly reminded of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible". John Brigge bears a strong resemblence to the John Proctor character in "The Crucible" and his situation to Proctor's one-man crusade against the witch hunt of the McCarthyist era in America. Even his secret shame - a past adulterous affair he deeply regrets with Dorcas, the servant girl, his wife Elizabeth's unexpressed knowledge of it - is almost identical to Proctor's tragic situation that would lead ultimately to his undoing. Adultery, conscionable treachery, dishonourable compromise are all common failings, but there is redemption yet if one has the courage to remember what it means to be human.

Bennett's writing is gloriously profound. His prose flows beautifully. There are lapses though, as when his characters disappear into their own thoughts and start to hallucinate. I also felt the story ended on a rather unsteady note.

"Havoc, In Its Third Year" is nevertheless a substantial triumph that stands head and shoulders above some other more famous books published in 2004. A Booker longlist that should have been in the shortlist.

Yorkshire in the 1630s is a bleak, impoverished place. Puritanism is gathering strength. The harvest has failed for the third year in succession, and desperation is spreading. The response of the local authorities is a law and order crackdown, which remarkably enough has done nothing to reduce thefts or public disturbances.

The current group of local governors came to power amid high hopes, after dislodging the harsh Lord Savile. Three years on, they are falling under the icy hand of Protestant fanatics. The moderates are gradually picked off, set up and arrested, and the bigots are eager to tip the scales further. Opportunists shift their ground; the local leader Nathaniel Challoner, a rather Bill Clinton-esque figure, tacks ever further to the Right to hold his support base.

John Brigge has to find his way through this tricky place. He is a relatively well-off farmer, also the public coroner and a governor of his town, but his status is made precarious by his secret, but widely suspected, Catholicism: by now the Papists are few, scattered and in fear of their lives, blamed for any and all public unrest. Even the Town Watch feels able to sport with Brigge as he tries to pass the gates.

Brigge's mindset has been shaped by the old medieval world, a world full of signs and symbols, where there is a place for everyone and everyone is in their place - he has no feel for the new Protestantism with its progress toward cold, self-interested rationality.

Brigge sometimes attempts to use his position as coroner to defend the innocent and hold the brutal to account, at other times he withdraws to his estate well removed from the town. Neither strategy works very well. Faced by Challoner's slide towards tyranny he is increasingly uneasy for himself and his family, but also sad for Challoner himself, an old friend.

The story line follows Brigge's investigation into the Irishwoman Katherine Shay, imprisoned for the death of her newborn child. The main witness, a 16-year-old girl, has not returned from a visit to relatives. He suspects involvement from one of his enemies, Richard Doliffe, and pursues the case both for justice and in the hope of bringing down his dangerous opponent.

All this is set against Brigge's personal life. His wife Elizabeth is due to give birth, after several miscarriages. Theirs is a tender relationship, complicated, however, by his affair with the girl Dorcas who lives with them. All are in pain: Brigge from guilt and confusion, Dorcas from guilt and her unrequited love for him, Elizabeth from her knowledge of the affair. Yet all manage to maintain their dignity.

The hook which threatens to draw this delicate situation into the public domain is Brigge's apprentice, Adam. He wants to marry Dorcas (who would rather remain second to Elizabeth in Brigge's heart than be Adam's wife). Making matters far worse, Adam is also caught up in the cold excitement of the puritan crackdown, which would be ample in itself for testing his loyalty to his master... and he knows of the family's secret Papist practices.

For most of the story Brigge heads ever-deeper into bewilderment and disarray. Neither personal decency nor public office can accomplish much when they do not align with one or another of the current forces in society.

While Protestants happen to be the persecutors here, the author's real targets are bigotry and tyranny. Brigge's local priest is on the run, but we get a glimpse of the man's taste for torture should he ever hold the whip hand.

The book is rich in contemporary references. Some of them are particular to the author's birthplace of Northern Ireland. As a Catholic schoolboy he was "routinely rounded up with hundreds of others by British troops and spent several years in an internment camp", according to a review by Carolyn See (Washington Post). However, sectarian hatreds do not rule out ugly alliances at elite level, and he brings that out too.

There are messages about law-and-order policies that stare you in face, but he also notes a tendency toward economic blackmail by the rich, who threaten to remove themselves from the parish if their taxes rise. When a teenage girl is flogged to death for fornication it is, again, hard to escape comparisons to events the current world, although the media tends to frame them in terms of Islam rather than poverty.

Several reviewers have discussed the difficulty faced by historical novelists in bringing out the language of the time. Kathryn Hughes (Guardian) has a particularly interesting commentary on this point, noting that Bennett uses "a language heavily inflected by the English of the King James Bible, commissioned a couple of decades before his story starts".

In his preface to Havoc, Bennett recalls a society unhinged by threats from abroad-papist armies-and within-traitors, Irish immigrants, gypsies, those natives dispossessed of their lands, Jesuits, and assorted other Catholics. The English with property who resented the burden to their town's coffers, the threat imposed by vagabonds on the highways, and the ideological dissension against the Commonwealth rallied under leaders promising-under the sign of the laurel branch-to restore the true Faith and retain those strong enough to lock up, exile, or condemn those who sought to undermine their kingdom. `Inspired by Scripture, with a burning vision of a just, godly, disciplined community, they determined to uphold the law, reform the manners and habits of the poor, protect true religion, and maintain orthodoxy in word and deed. They were often sincere, energetic, and compassionate; they were also intolerant and merciless (their principles demanded no less).' (2) Seeking unanimity and no protest, they dedicated themselves to a better land, one that would please their Creator by enforcing an end to humanity's baser actions and instincts. Bennett implies that such a tale might not seem out of place today. Imams and preachers might agree.

Fairly, the author, aided by his own considerable familiarity with legal theories and the everyday practices of the early 17th c., strives to be fair to both sides in this clash of ideologies. John Brigge himself comes from the recusants, those few who persisted in Catholicism and who argues for mercy against those who triumph in their wish to render harsh justice.

Bennett eschews stereotypes, at least in his narrative's start. In prose crafted painstakingly to convey the thoughts and speech of educated as well as ignorant folks of the 1630s, Bennett carefully shows, in a novel entirely from Brigge's indirectly expressed consciousness, how visions, dreams, portents, and prayers mixed with half-understood remedies, medical hearsay, and folkloric incantations to construct the mind of a sophisticated early 17 c. Englishman. His use of colloquial dialogue, monologue, and period details portrays a land not unfamiliar to inhabitants of such climes today, but one before the Enlightenment, before scientific breakthroughs, and one still trusting in revelations as much as reason. The picture seen through Brigge's eyes, painted by Bennett, remains far more reliant upon fevered reveries as much as ratiocination, and this results in an uneven novel. At times, the focus blurs and shifts, as in an art-house movie, away from a determinedly realistic into an impressionistic depiction of a mentality still pre-modern. While the intent is admirable, the changes do deter contemporary 21st c. readers from fully appreciating Bennett's attempt to faithfully match Brigge's mental state. The jarring entry, especially as the novel progresses, of nearly magical realism (to use the Latin American fictional equivalent) draws too much attention to the art utilised by Bennett at the risk of too much concentration on the illusionary state suffered by Brigge, upon whom we as readers remain dependent for the entire story.

This shortcoming aside, Bennett exposes a Brueghelian tableau of hideous faces, strange diets, and half-fanciful caricatures as he brings into his novel a mixture of a murder mystery that Brigge must solve, a family drama as he must wrestle with the aftermath of infidelity while caring for his new son, and his own manipulation by the city officials who seek either his allegiance or his ouster. The plot carries you forward, past the genre formulae of a whodunit, into the tension between two visions of how people are to be governed. Implicitly, Brigge's Catholic tendency to forgive stands a losing battle against the Puritan emphasis upon punishment against the sinner. Brigge, fearing that he cannot resist the majority, wakes one night: `He tried to pray, but he could not make himself unafraid. This is man's true state, he thought, to know fear. This is what being human means, above all else. We are bundles of fear and need. The rest is a mere distraction, a way to deceive ourselves out of our terrors, which we sometimes hide and which we sometimes forget, but we remain afraid. We are all afraid.' Insensibly, Bennett's existential modern view merges with that of his 1630s character, steeped in Catholic verities yet terrified by the void.

The novel loses pace after a deus ex machina allows Brigge to wander out on the roads with a band of half-crazed pilgrims advocating evangelical purity; Bennett seems to be setting up a sequel to his novel before he finishes Brigge's own tale. Its diffusion into almost magical realism casts more of a miasmatic haze over the denouement, and diminishes the power of the earlier chapters. This shortcoming aside, the novel still remains worth reading for its prose, its acuity, and its topic.

(Adapted from "Puritan Death Ethic," on-line review at the website for The Blanket)

I agree completely with the "heavy-handed" assessment of another reviewer.
This work is NOT a historical novel. It uses another time and place to write a rather overwrought story of religious intolerance that is somehow supposed to reflect on our times. Such a theme is universal. But readers interested in this novel's period of history would be more entertained and better served by reading David Underdown's "Fire from Heaven" about the "godly reformation" battles in 17th century Dorchester, England.

This novel would be of interest if only because it covers a period that the founders of the United States sought to avoid and Cheney and his fellow neoconservatives have strived with near success to return too. Here is an England beset by superstition whose leaders rule by setting one religion against the next. Inferior as a novel to say, "An Instance of the Fingerpost," it's protagonist is a man who like Zhivago wishes only to tend his own garden and by not getting involved succeeds only in betraying his fellow man.

Skillfully written, though hardly a mystery novel as some reviewers have suggested.

I don't need to go into the plot details. Those have been covered more than sufficiently.

The characters are well developed. The language is flowing and formal and authentic. The historical details enrich the story. I love books that have to do with old England, but not this one. It has nothing to do with the hardness of the times, the triumvirate's power hungry mindset or the manifestations of their determination to wipe out every last vestige of sin, no matter how small. I've read other books that deal with that theme.

But somehow this one just didn't work for me. And it's not the ending becuase I've read plenty of books with depressing endings. Perhaps it had to do with the madness of Kate Shay, her determination - along with the others who were displaced - to elevate Brigge to some sort of prophet status, viewing him as St. Germanus. At any rate, it was a depressing ending to a depressing book.

The cover notes for this historical novel indicate that it is a sort of parable for our own time, and that is accurate. It is, however, somewhat self-consciously a parable, and therefore not a very good novel. It's a pity; the author writes well, and appears to know his history, but we get no real historical detail and precious little character development -- just a parable. Don't waste your time.