AFTER A LIFETIME OF BIBLIOPHILIA
I have been asked a couple of times by readers (and repeatedly by Kate Burns!) to list my all-time-favourite medieval books, so here we go. However, that accounts only for the first ten. I decided I was getting much too specialised here (I don't only read medieval books!) so I have added various other almost random categories to broaden the horizon a bit.
First though, ten medieval categories.
1. Medieval Mystery
Starting with a difficult one. The best stand-alone medieval mystery I have come across is probably Barry Unsworth's Morality Play, but Judith Koll Henley's The Canterbury Papers is also astonishingly good.
2. Medieval Mystery Series
This is even more difficult. There are four I cannot easily choose between. Under pressure I will mention first Roberta Gellis' Magdalena la Batarde series, which is set in a London "guesthouse" during the period of civil conflict between Matilda and her cousin Stephen; the other three are Alys Clare's Helewise and Josse d'Aquin series (civil strife between King Richard and his brother, the future King John), Margaret Frazer's Frevisse and Joliffe series (civil strife in the period leading up to the War of the Roses), and of course Ellis Peters' Cadfael series (Cadfael is a contemporary of Magdalena and her girls, though I doubt if they ever met). Roman Polanski once observed that "In grief, one turns either to the monastery or to the brothel." This seems to apply also to medieval mysteries!
It's no good, I also have to mention here Paul Doherty's six Canterbury Tales of Mystery and Murder; they are full of medieval magic and are in my view not only the best books this very prolific author has ever written but among the best medieval mysteries ever written.
3. Medieval Romance
Here there can be no doubt about it: Anya Seton's Katherine, the tale of the all-surmounting love between John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, is still by far the best.
4. Medieval Fictionalised Life-Story
By "fictionalised life-story" I mean a novel based on the life of a well-known historical character. The best-known of all such novels is probably Robert Graves' I, Claudius, but that is not medieval, and I will say here and now, loudly and clearly, that I think Helen Waddell's Peter Abelard is at least as good; in fact it is quite perfect. ("Katherine" – see above – is also a fictionalised life-story, and in its own way, too, perfect.)
5. Medieval: Witchcraft and Paganism
For witchcraft and paganism in action and the clash between the Old Religion and the Catholic Church in the form of the Inquisition, the best is probably Burning Times by Jeanne Kalogridis.
6. Medieval: Shape-Shifting
As with Medieval Romance, there can be no doubt about this: Alice Borchardt's The Silver Wolf. It is, unlike most stories of shape-shifters, completely realistic and utterly convincing. At the same time it manages to be an outstanding historical novel, bringing vividly to life the still holy but very delapidated city of Rome in the time of the Emperor Charlemagne
7. Medieval: The Templars
Another clear first choice: The Last of the Templars by William Watson. I might observe that there are an awful lot of very bad books dealing with the Templars.
8. Medieval: Celtic
I can't avoid putting two novels with a medieval Irish setting here. One, Juliet Marillier's Daughter of the Forest (with its two sequels, Son of the Shadows and Child of the Prophecy) is the best Celtic medieval fantasy novel, full of perfectly presented magic and mystery. For straight historical fiction, though, set at the time of the clash between the Church and Druidism, there is nothing to compare with Kate Horsley's Confessions of a Pagan Nun.
9. Medieval: Saxon
No one should miss Brian Bates' The Way of Wyrd – another story of the clash between the incoming and the ancient religions, this time in England.
10. Medieval: Oriental
Silk Roads and Shadows, Susan Shwartz's story of a journey (though it is more like a metaphor for life) along the Silk Road from Constantinople to China, via Tibet – and Shangrila!
And now for a further fifteen other, more general, categories.
11. Historical Novel
The best historical novel of all may well be The Egyptian by Mika Waltari . Set in the time of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, It is the story of Sinuhe, a foundling who grows up to become a celebrated physician. But who really is Sinuhe?
12. Post-Disaster Novel
This is without doubt Russell Hoban's Ridley Walker: post-nuclear-holocaust England, all written in a decadent simplified English that is both exactly what one might expect in a society with no education or culture or technology, and at the same time intensely poetic.
I'm not sure whether that counts as SF, but here are six SF categories.
13. SF: Alternative History
Doris Lessing's Shikasta (and its sequels). What may really have happened – and be still happening (by this year's Nobel Prize winner).
14. SF: Time-Portal
In Julian May's series which began with The Many-Colored Land, people use a one-way time-portal to travel back to the Pliocene Age, and create there a world quite different from the one we know. A world I would, I have to say, love to visit myself – even knowing it was going to be a one-way trip. (That, incidentally, applies to the worlds created in most of the books on this list; which is perhaps why I like them so much.) Another book I have to mention here is Whores of Babylon by Ian Watson. Ostensibly the Babylon to which our young and unheroic hero is transported is a high-tech replica of ancient Babylon in the 3rd century BC at the time when Alexander the Great lay there a-dying. But can it be so realistic? (There was a discussion on MBG's blog a while back about whether or not this is a time-travel story.)
15. SF: Near Future
Robert A. Heinlein's Methuselah's Children and its sequels, Time Enough For Love, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, etc . The secret of 'eternal youth' and the story of Lazarus Long, the oldest man in the universe.
16. SF: Galactic Empires
Frank Herbert's Dune – and I mean the whole series (including those written recently by his son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson!)
17. SF: Distant Future (End of Time)
I loved Michael Moorcock 's Dancers at the End of Time sequence, but the best single novel I have come across that is set in our far distant future is Brian Aldiss' Hothouse.
18. 19th Century Novel
Just to be different, I'll choose the wonderful Mary Barton by Mrs (Elizabeth) Gaskell, but for the record my favourite Brontë is Emily and I love her poetry ("No coward soul is mine ... ")as well as her novel Wuthering Heights, and my favourite Dickens novel is Great Expectations.
19. Gothic Novel
There were many good ones in the 18th and 19th centuries (including of course Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein") and the whole thing peaked with Bram Stoker in "Dracula", which I would happily re-read any time. However, here I want to draw attention to a recent book (first published 2005) The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova; it is a radically new take on the Dracula theme, and is certainly one of the best novels I have read in the last few years.
20. WWI Novel
Ethel Mannin's Cactus is a small but perfect evocation of one woman's life before, during and after the First World War.
21. WWII Novel
What can I say? There is nothing quite like Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Your whole world-view changes as you read it. But in a more serious vein, probably the best novel which deals with the holocaust and anti-judaism in history is Andre Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just. (It is set partly in the medieval period!) And then there is Ken Follet's superb thriller The Eye of the Needle, which is set in England in 1944, a few short weeks before D-day.
22. Cold War Novel
I can't whittle it down to one here, either. John le Carré's The Spy who Came In from the Cold captures the mood perfectly; but so, while taking a more light-hearted look at the situation, does Our Man In Havana by Graham Greene. (Coincidentally, Graham Greene wrote of le Carré's "The Spy who Came In from the Cold" that it was "the best spy story I have ever read".)
23. Middle East Conflict Novel
Again there are two, and neither of the authors new-comers to this list. First has to be le Carré again, whose The Little Drummer-Girl is, in my opinion, his best novel, or at any rate the best since "The Spy who Came In from the Cold". Another contender is Triple by Ken Follett. Both books are absolutely impossible to put down but whereas Follett's story is about a confrontation between professional agents from three different countries at the time when Israel was desperately trying to beg, borrow or buy some plutonium (or steal it if necessary), le Carré's focuses on a young English actress who gets caught up in the conflict when she is used by a Mossad agent to infiltrate a group of Palestinians who are believed to be reponsible for a series of bomb attacks.
24. Private Eye Novel
This is very difficult, but I have managed to single out one: Cold Heart, the last in the Lorraine Page series by Linda la Plante. The other two in the trilogy are Cold Shoulder and Cold Blood. All equally good, in fact, and you need to read them in order.
25. Great Writing – Poetry in Prose
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, the first two books of which, Justine and Balthazar, are surely among the most beautifully written at any time in any language; and the quartet as a whole captures perfectly the period and place – Alexandria during the lead-up to WWII. Another gem is Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, an exquisite miniature portrait of one man which you hold close to your eyes, in contrast to Durrell's four great murals overflowing with life and painted on the walls of one room: to appreciate them you have to stand in the middle of the room ...
26. Children's Book
Finally, a category I was not going to include, but then thought someone might be able to help me. The book for kids that I remember best is a marvellously dreamy Irish tale of an old Ballad Singer and the three people (two of them children) who accompany him on his travels. It is called The Grey Goose of Kilnevin, but I no longer have a copy of it, I cannot remember the name of the author, and I can find no trace of it on the internet. If anybody out there knows of this book and can help, please email me, here.
