Paula Stiles's Blog
Posted by Paula Stiles
Eric van Lustbader's The Testament (2006) feels like a cross between The Da Vinci Code and a Clive Cussler adventure. It's better than Dan Brown's turgid potboilers, but not as good as Dirk Pitt. The hero, Braverman (Bravo) Shaw, loses his mysterious father in a terrible explosion. Soon, he's caught up in a race between two secret societies (the Order of the Gnostic Observatines and their papacy-backed enemies the Knights of St. Clement of the Holy Blood) to find a cache of artifacts. His only ally, Gnostic Observatine "Guardian" Jenny Logan, may also be his worst enemy.
This is a straightforward modern Grail story after the pattern of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (see this week's film review). The idea of a "testament" written by Christ (hence the title) isn't new. Nor is the idea behind the "Quintessence".
Lustbader writes good action scenes and keeps the plot moving, though he drones on with too much background. Unlike Brown, who not only had his wife do his highly derivative research for him, but also cynically exploited the genre with an "I'm going to make a bestseller for people who don't read" attitude, Lustbader did his own homework. Some of the best melding of setting with plot occurs in Venice, which Lustbader appears to have both visited and loved, unlike Brown's Paris, which is unrecognizable to anyone who's actually visited that city.
The good plot stuff mainly involves the female arm of the Order of the Gnostic Observatines, led by a Venetian anchoress named Arcangela, whose agent in the world becomes Jenny. There's a lot of intriguing background hinted at about Renaissance Venice's whores spying for God across Europe. The book might have been really something had it centered around Jenny. It's high time we had a Grail story with a female protagonist.
Alas, the highly competent Jenny exists only to help Our Hero, the clueless, naïve and self-involved young Bravo. Whenever a book's protagonist has a silly nickname like "Bravo", this is a bad sign. The fact that just about every character in the book is movie-star beautiful or handsome is another one.
Jenny is ruined as a character by falling in love with Bravo, even though he's a complete twit with daddy issues. Bravo is the worst part of the book, and since he's in most of it, that's a problem. He abuses and rejects Jenny, for example, based on the word of a misogynistic priest he himself admits is an idiot and of someone who later turns out to be a major villain with a sinister interest in separating the young couple. Until quite late in the book, if Bravo trusts someone, it's a guarantee that person is a villain. His character judgment is that bad.
Lustbader bases his mythical secret military religious order, the Gnostic Observatines, on two historical groups: the Fraticelli, a radical arm of the Franciscans who insisted on St. Francis' original aim of apostolic poverty and were declared heretical in 1318, and the early medieval Gnostics. The Gnostics believed every human had a spark of God inside him or herself and could therefore arrive at the truth of Scripture him or herself. The Gnostics rejected Church authority as corrupted by a Satan-dominated material world and advocated a life of the spirit. They were also anti-war pacifists, which would make them antithetical to the philosophy of a military order.
The Knights of St. Clement of the Holy Blood, as Lustbader himself admits in his Author's Note at the end of the book, are based on the Knights of St. John (Hospitallers). The Hospitallers were the second great international military religious order, after their rivals, the Templars. They were also known as the Knights of Malta and the Knights of Rhodes, due to their having headquarters at various times on those two islands.
Lustbader avoids the traditional use of the Templars as guardians of the Grail. Unfortunately, the Franciscans are not a good group on which to base a military order like the Gnostic Observatines, either, especially one tolerant of Jews, as Lustbader makes his Gnostic Observatines in politically correct fashion. The mendicant orders (the Franciscans and the Dominicans) made up the bulk of the Inquisition, and as such, were hostile to the military orders, heretics and Jews. Lustbader also betrays an ignorance of the basic nature of military religious orders when he calls his inner circle of Gnostic Observatines "priests". These orders were monastic orders where the priests had a very auxiliary role. Those in such an inner circle would all be monks.
The Hospitallers are also a bad model for anti-gnostic pro-Catholic heavies the Knights of St. Clement. Lustbader ignores a truly gnostic group from the 12th and 13th centuries--the Cathars (or "Albigensians") of southeastern France. Northern French forces led a nominally religious crusade (more a papally sanctioned naked land grab) against the Cathars in the Albigensian Crusade during the early 13th century (mainly 1208-1225). Neither the Hospitallers nor the Templars supported such "internal" crusades against enemies at home, since they diverted badly needed funds, supplies and personnel from the struggle to hold onto Palestine. Some local Hospitallers during the Albigensian Crusade even supported the Cathars, drawing censure from Pope Innocent III. Why would the Hospitallers then actively persecute another gnostic group later on for the Papacy?
This book isn't perfect, but a fan of the genre should still find some good in it. Someday, hopefully, Lustbader will write a story centered around the women of the Gnostic Observatines. They're much more interesting than the men.
Posted by Paula Stiles
As an oral history, the Mande Epic of Son-Jara suffers from the same problem as Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon literature and The Song of Roland in French literature. Written down centuries after the fact (The Epic of Son-Jara was finally set down in print by Mandinka bard Fa-Digi Sisoko 1968), it recounts a tale that has been told and retold and polished and changed around a thousand times, much like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. However, unlike the Iliad and Odyssey, or Beowulf, we know for a fact that some of the figures in the Epic are historical, not mythical.
As this week's article shows, Son-Jara was a real king, the founder of the Mali Empire over a century later. We know this because the North African traveler Ibn Battuta mentions Son-Jara's victory over his enemies in the next century. As in The Song of Roland, the basic events appear to be true. This therefore makes some of the aspects of Son-Jara's story quite fascinating.
We can approach with considerable skepticism the claim in the Epic that Son-Jara (historically known as Sundiata) was descended from Bilal, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad, through his father. However, a look at how Son-Jara survives childhood and builds up his power base against the occupying Susu King Sumamuru (also an historical figure) in the Epic explains why his descendants would make the claim. His mother is a powerful sorceress in her own right; she and Son-Jara's other female relatives bring their considerable and formidable family connections to his side in his revolt. In Son-Jara's society, family is everything. Though the society is becoming nominally Muslim, even Islam must bow at this point in Malian history to family ties and therefore, Son-Jara's connection to Islam in the epic must be familial to have any legitimacy.
Recent research indicates that the epic might have begun as a series of praise songs for Sundiata by his descendants. Praise singing is a quite old tradition in Africa that is slowly dying out. A traditional (i.e. pre-colonial) African leader's public image is largely based on the number, reputation and skill of his praise singers. Praise singers walk ahead of the leader, announcing his presence with epithets of praise. However, they might also list histories of his forbears along with descriptions of their main accomplishments. Hence the possible origins of the Epic of Son-Jara in songs of praise for his descendants.
Beverly Mack has studied praise singers (zabiya) of the Emir of Kano in northern Nigeria, and included some of their songs in an accompanying CD in her book "Muslim Women Sing: Hausa Popular Song" (2004).