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HERESY
by S J Parris
Penguin Canada, February 2010
448 pages
$25.00 CAD
ISBN: 0143172468


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

In general, I am unenthusiastic about crime novels that feature actual historical figures in the central role of detective. But I was curious about this one, largely because the historical figure in question, Giordano Bruno, is himself so contradictory and intriguing that I wondered what the author would make of him.

I first became interested in Bruno a few years ago in Rome when, wandering though the Campo de' Fiori, I came across his statue, heaped with tributes and red roses left by various societies of atheists and freethinkers more than 400 years after he had been burned at the stake on that spot. While religious figures, saints, and martyrs sometimes get this sort of treatment, this was the first "atheist" I had ever come across to be remembered in this way. Whether the freethinkers had chosen the right hero is certainly open to question, but the idea is a charming one.

In HERESY, we find Bruno in Oxford. He has been on the run from the Roman Inquisition for a number of years, dodging danger by staying out of his native country and finding protection with men in high places. At this point, he is in England, where he has resumed his friendship with Sir Philip Sydney and is secretly acting as a spy for Sir Francis Walsingham, "the queen's spymaster," devoted to rooting out plots against Elizabeth designed to restore a Catholic to the throne. But Bruno is no Protestant zealot; here he is motivated by the need to make a living and by the desire to find space and time in which to complete his new cosmogony. Specifically he hopes to find in Oxford a lost work by Hermes Trismegistus, which he believes holds the key to a universal truth.

What he finds instead in Lincoln College is an isolated group of men who have been forced over their lifetimes to publicly repudiate their religious beliefs not once, but several times. Some of them privately retain their old Catholic faith and allegiance to the Pope, risking their lives by attending Mass in secret. Theirs is a political even more than a doctrinal offense, as the Pope had declared Elizabeth a heretic and released her Catholic subjects from any duty of obedience to her. Thus they could be declared traitors and Walsingham was determined to find and eliminate them.

Almost immediately upon Bruno's arrival in Oxford, a series of horrifying murders takes place within Lincoln College. Fellows of the college are being killed and their corpses grotesquely mutilated to reflect the grim stories of the deaths of saints in Foxe's Book of Martyrs. The Rector, an elderly and less than courageous man, finally induces Bruno to investigate these killings. What he discovers is a nest of lies, intrigue, and passion that he cannot make sense of almost until the final pages.

HERESY is grounded in ascertainable fact and sound conjecture. Parris effectively develops a complex and contradictory character in Bruno and avoids taking sides in the religious wars. But beyond being a thoroughly satisfying account of a vexed and fascinating period in English history, it also may be seen as striking a cautionary note for our own time. Bruno, the Italian outsider, fits the "profile" of a secret Jesuit and is at risk of his life for that reason. The passions aroused by religious conviction on both sides of the doctrinal debate result in assaults on human beings too horrifying even to think about. Bruno ends his account in the hope for a better world in which, religious strife at an end, "we pass into the enlightenment of our shared humanity and shared divinity," a world which, alas, we have not yet achieved.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, May 2010

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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