Book Reviews

The Trial Of the Templars

by Malcolm Barber

     There have been tons of books written about the Knights Templars that are filled with garbage. The Trial Of the Templars by Malcolm Barber isn’t one of them. This is a sober-minded account of how they were taken down by church and state. In fact, this book isn’t actually a comprehensive history of this most famous of all medieval fraternal orders. It is really about their persecution and destruction at the hands of the monarchy.

The opening chapter gives a short account of who the Templars were. They rose up to be the most prominent and successful order of knights during the Crusades at the turn of the 14^th century. They built castles at outposts throughout the Middle East, provided protection for people on pilgrimage to the so-called Holy Land, and set up a primitive banking network. Admission to this secret society was highly coveted because it guaranteed rapid social advancement for the lower classes and they were considered exempt from prosecution by dictate from the Catholic church.

Then Pope Clement V and Phillip IV came to power and everything went to hell for the highly revered knights. Clement V held the papacy in Avignon during the schism when France tried to wrestle the position out of the hands of the Vatican in Rome. Clement V had plans for expanding the power of the church and part of his plot involved uniting all knightly orders into one army in order to fight another crusade. The Templars, who prized their privileged status, didn’t want to share it with others so the conflict went from there. Phillip IV was installed as King of France by divine mandate according to Clement V, who was backed by the monarchy in his bid to control the church from Avignon. Phillip IV also had big ambitions to untie France into one kingdom, taking land from England, Flanders, Germany, Sicily, and Italy. His problem was that the previous king had nearly bankrupted the monarchy by building too many castles and funding too many crusades which were becoming less and less successful due to the rise of Saladin, the commander who led the Muslims to victory over the Crusaders. The battle of Acre, in what is now Syria, was the turning point and they blamed the Templars for the defeat.

Phillip IV needed money and guess who the richest and most unpopular people were at the time?The Templars. Clement and Phillip conspired together to take the order down. The pope declared them heretics and the French aristocracy was put in charge of the trial. Accusations of satanism, blasphemy, and homosexuality were leveled against the Templars and many confessions were obtained after some of the knights were tortured. Many of them retracted their confessions, and those who did were burned at the stake.

Malcolm Barber does an outstanding job of explaining the legal, theological, and technical aspects of the trial and points out how the government and church were able to manipulate the French populace and turn them against the Templars. Part of Barber’s methodology is to repeat over and over again what the Templars confessed. It was the same thing every time: spitting and walking on a cross, denying the divinity of Jesus Christ, worshiping idols, kissing men’s anuses, indulging in sodomy, and practicing witchcraft. By repeating the confessions continuously, the words get seared into your brain. This is awfully annoying for the reader, but it seems Barber has done this to make his point. After reading the same thing so many times, you tend to forget that these confessions were the result of torture. We should know by now that during torture, people will confess to anything, no matter how untrue or absurd, to make the torture stop. Imagine how the medieval illiterates who watched the trials would feel after hearing confession after confession without even knowing the knights had spent so much times in the dungeons. While this might be a mind-numbing writing technique, it goes a long way in helping the author to make his case.

Barber breaks up the painful monotony with one interesting chapter that traces the folkloric roots of the accusations against the Templars. He examines myths, legends, and folk tales that were circulating at the time that contributed to the public’s perception that the Templars were Satanists. Other than that, this book is thankfully devoid of any of the occult or conspiracy theory crap that usually gets attached to the name of the Holy Order Of the Knights Of the Temple.

Malcolm Barber’s The Trial Of the Templars is a stone cold attempt at presenting the facts surrounding the liquidation of the Knights Templar. While it isn’t a thrilling read, he succeeds in demonstrating how the real evil happening in this historical legal drama was on the throne and in the church. None of the skullduggery going on had anything to do with what the Templars were actually up to; it was entirely the result of a plot hatched by those in power who were greedy for more wealth. Don’t say it can’t happen here in America during the 21^st century. Human nature hasn’t changed at all since the Middle Ages. 

 

Book Review

The Godmakers

by Frank Herbert

     It’s probably safe to assume that most people who read Frank Herbert’s The Godmakers are big fans of Dune who want to expand their reading of this famous author. When I decided to read this, I thought the best approach would be to put Dune completely out of mind and encounter The Godmakers on its own. Easier said than done. This short novel introduces characters and themes that are so obviously precursors to Herbert’s well-known masterpiece that I found it impossible to separate them.

Sometime in the future, all the inhabited planets at the edge of the galaxy get destroyed in a disaster called the Rim War. The survivors spread out to other planets and begin new processes of environmental adaptation, some of them speciating away from humans. The main character is Orne, a genius rookie government agent who gets sent to a planet to look for signs of possible aggression and the kinds of warnings that might indicate the start of another destructive war. He calls his commanding officer, a grim and serious man named Stetson, to the planet because something doesn’t seem right. Orne follows his hunch and uses Sherlock Holmes style deductive logic to explain why he thinks the inhabitants might be hostile.

Stetson is so impressed with Orne’s abilities that he promotes him to a position in the I-A, a kind of espionage agency that sends agents to newly discovered planets. In the next section, Orne visits a planet with thick jungle and tree-dwelling ape-like creatures with advanced technology. The I-A wants to destroy them because they are violent and hostile, but Orne, who is inclined towards pacifism, negotiates with them to avoid war.

After Orne almost dies in an explosion, doctors reconstruct his body, possibly a bit of Christian symbolism, and send him on another espionage mission to spy on a family of politicians in order to find out if they are plotting to overthrow the government. The women in the family belong to a secret society called the Nathians and Orne finds out he was born as a Nathian too, giving him powers of second sight and precognition. Here we see a direct link with the Bene Gesserit and Paul Atreiddes, the messiah in Dune. A theme of family conflict is also introduced here. Orne had a troubled relationship with his family who were also friends with the people he is staying with. Herbert misses an opportunity here to introduce an interesting subplot, but he never goes anywhere with it after its initial entry into the narrative. These first three sections are the best part of the book.

In the fourth section, Orne is sent to a planet called Amel where he is trained in the use of psi, a type of psychic-spiritual mind force that only few people are able to master. Their intention is to train him to be a god so that he can start a new interplanetary religion. Orne is given a series of tests which prove he can control his powers. The theory Herbert uses behind all this is a mixture of Taoism, Islam, and Jungian psychology, emphasizing awareness of the shadow-shelf, developing the will, and integrating the personality. Where Dune focuses on what Paul Atreides does after becoming the messiah, The Godmakers is all about what Orne has to do to become a god. Maybe Herbert wants to say that the successful patient in psychoanalysis will become like a god. Who really knows? The meaning of this is vague.

The first three sections are exciting, even if they are a bit too short, because they are stories of intrigue with a narrative structure that builds suspense. The characters of Orne and Stetson are also well drawn so that I expected something really exciting to happen later in the novel. But that never comes to be. The fourth part just kind of drifts along without any major events or peaks in the narrative to make it feel complete or give it closure. It has a lot of half-baked psychology and theology and the tests that Orne has to pass are not that exciting. The first one, for example, involves him lying on the floor and resisting the temptation to move. Exciting? It’s a good thing his balls didn’t itch. After that it gets kind of cartoonish and flat. The worst part of it all is that Herbert never gives a clear explanation of what it means for Orne to become a god. He just becomes a god and then the novel ends.

The Godmakers is one of those novels that starts out strong with a lot of potential and then starts fading away half way through. It might be of interest to Dune fans who want to see where Herbert was coming from before he wrote his classic epic series, but beyond that it isn’t much. 

 

Book Review

The Decameron

by Giovanni Boccaccio

translated by Richard Aldington

     What would you do if a deadly pandemic began ravishing your country? Alright, don’t answer that. I know what most people would do now. Wallowing in misery while staring at a cell phone for eighteen hours everyday isn’t the best response you could come up with. Following Qanon wasn’t too bright either. Take it from Giovanni Boccaccio. During the Black Death he sat down and wrote a classic collection of short stories known as The Decameron. It turned out to be so good that it influenced some seriously big names in literary history like Chaucer and Shakespeare. There are a few of us who still read it now. What is interesting about this book is that Boccaccio captured a certain kind of response that some young people in Italy had to the plague. If people had been reading this book in 2019, you might imagine that the American response to Covid-19 would have been a healthier one.

As The Decameron opens, ten young Florentines, seven women and three men, decide to leave the miseries of the city and go out to the Tuscan countryside where they settle in a chateau. While the urban Black Death is thoroughly miserable, the group seeks happiness in escapism by gathering for a span of ten days in a garden with a fountain. Each succeeding day, a new person is given a crown of laurel to wear and, as king or queen, takes a turn at directing the entertainment. Every person tells a story each day and that amounts to 1000 stories for those of you too lazy to do the math. They also have fun singing, dancing, playing music, eating, and enjoying the natural scenery of Tuscany’s countryside. Note that their response was one of participation and creativity, not passive submission to mindless fluff entertainment.

On each day, a different theme is chosen. On the first day, they tell stories relating some sort of religious moral. These get boring pretty quickly; Christianity has never been a reliable source of excitement. Things pick up on the second day when slightly shocking tales of horny monks, priests, and nuns begin to capture their imagination. From then on, there are a lot of stories about adultery or illicit sex, a few about crime, and a handful of grotesque narratives involving cannibalism or jealous husbands getting revenge by murdering their wives’ lovers or even, sometimes, their wives. In one such story, later adapted for a poem by John Keats, a husband cuts off his spouse’s lover’s head so she puts it in a clay pot and grows basil out of it. Another adulterous wife is given her dead lover’s heart in a goblet so she cries into it, fills it with wine, adds some poison, and drinks it all down. Other stories are a little more upbeat. One interesting section is all about tricks that husbands and wives play on each other to either conceal or reveal a sexual affair. The book ends with stories of generosity and heroism.

You can make a few inferences about medieval Italian society if you follow the repeating motifs in these tales. One is that people who get buried alive or thrown into wells always get rescued. Maybe this is a riff on Christian symbolism. The rescued men are often victims of betrayal and get their revenge in the end. Regarding religion, church authorities are chronically scummy, dishonest, and hypocritical. They seduce women, often through trickery, and extort money. They often care more about hedonistic pleasures than the ordinary citizens who, themselves, are often preoccupied with sex, not much different from today’s sleazy evangelicals. But these medieval Italians are religious despite their disgust for the church. Both husbands and wives have affairs outside their marriages and the story tellers make it clear that they all approve of adultery. The women are especially vocal about a wife’s right to cheat on her husband because, according to them, one man does not have enough potency to be able to satisfy one woman. Hence, having a string of lovers is the only way for a wife to keep herself happy. From what I have experienced, the world of Southern Europe hasn’t changed much since Boccaccio’s time when it comes to sexuality. And why should it?

While these stories have simple themes and their meanings are easy to grasp, this is not the easiest book to read. True to Latin Mediterranean writing styles (yes this includes all you classic French writers, and I do mean the likes of you, Marcel Proust), it is an understatement to say that this writing is wordy. And by wordy, I really mean wordy. Some dialogues involve two people taking turns delivering speeches that run on for two or three pages at a time before turning the conversation over to the other person. This happens, for instance, in the story where a man traps a nude woman on a tower to starve and almost die of sunburn in revenge for a trick she played on him. When people argue, they don’t talk this way; they interrupt each other, cut each other off, and devote very little attention to listening. When Boccaccio’s couples argue, it can be a trial for the reader. This is the worst thing about reading this book. My other major criticism is that some of the stories only work because the characters are incredibly stupid, sometimes so stupid that it is hard to willingly suspend your capacity for disbelief. After one man gets told about a stone that makes people invisible, he believes he has found it and proceeds to act as if he were invisible while everybody laughs at him. He is not the dumbest one in this collection either. Some of Boccaccio’s humor also does not translate well into the 21^st century American mind.

The Decameron is long and dense with unnecessarily detailed prose. This is literature for people with a lot of time and a lot of patience. In a lot of ways it really shines by capturing the joie de vivre of ten young story tellers from Florence who seek affirmation for life during a dark and terrible time. It is saturated with the thrills of carnal indulgence and the Pagan celebration of nature that characterized this turning point from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Yet these story tellers never lose sight of the tragic side of life. Boccaccio’s response to the Black Death was one of optimism and renewal. Maybe if we learn from him, our world will see another Renaissance. We are about due for some positive change. 

 

Book Review

The Abortion:

An Historical Romance 1966

by Richard Brautigan

     It’s all about the womb. Richard Brautigan’s cult novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 is one of those polarizing books that people either love or hate, or maybe you could say they either get it or they don’t. Usually the ones who hate it are the ones who don’t get it. Considering its minimalist style, it’s surprising that some people don’t get it, but then again, minimalism is all about saying a lot by saying a little. What people don’t get is that this is a book of mythic proportions, saturated in archetypes, that tell the tale of a hero’s journey in a way Joseph Campbell could never have imagined. And when I say it is all about the womb, more than one thing is meant by that.

The first womb that must be mentioned is the library. How can a library be a womb? Well, we’ll get to that. This particular library is, as the narrator says early on, not your typical library. It is a place where unpublished authors leave a copy of a book they have written where it will be stored on a shelf and never read by anybody. The author was probably probing his fears and insecurities when he conceived of this. Some of the books are oddities like a manuscript about the history of pork that is bound in bacon, or mediocrities like extensive studies on Nebraska. Each volume is delivered by the lonely misfits and non-geniuses who wrote them. It is there they are received by the ghost in the machine, the narrator, who is none other than Richard Brautigan himself. At first it might be tempting to think of the narrator as an incarnation of Hermes, the Greek guardian of sacred and forbidden knowledge, but if you really want to get mythical about it all, it probably is best to say that the narrator is more like Apollo. Despite his beatnik and hippie trappings, the narrator is a rigidly disciplined man in the way he takes care of his library. He follows every rule, receives the books ceremoniously with minimal deviation to the routine, and is as neat and orderly as a man can possibly be. He is fanatically devoted to the library in a way that borders on neurosis. And he has a flat demeanor and deadpan sense of humor that rivals the comedian Steven Wright.

The second womb of importance is located in the stunningly perfect body of Vida, a young woman who brings a in book for the library’s collection. Her tome is all about how her beautiful body is a distraction because of all the men who want to get into her pants without knowing her as a person. She is the Aphrodite of the novel, raising the reading on men’s richter scales wherever she goes. But that is not entirely why her womb is so important. When she brings in her book, she falls in love with the narrator. After doing the wild thing, getting all the way to home base, and doing the sacred dance of the snake, Vida gets pregnant. Since the events of this story take place before the passage of Roe Vs. Wade, they decide to go to Tijuana for the abortion.

Enter Dionysus. Foster is the narrator’s friend and colleague, fun and charming, he always has a whisky bottle in his hand and never stops chasing tail. He stands guard over the third womb of importance, a cave where overstock from the library gets hauled away to be stored like an ever growing cache of unfertilized eggs. These literary eggs will never leave the cave through menstruation and they will never be inseminated because they will never be read. Caves are an ancient symbol of the womb which is why the rites of Eleusis were performed secretly in Mediterranean caverns. Foster’s job is to protect them from seepage, a problem that gets mentioned three times in the story. If Vida had been protected from seepage, she would not have gotten knocked up, but maybe things happen for a reason. Foster gets called in to make the arrangements for the abortion. After all, he has had a lot of experience with this particular problem. He watches over the library while the psychopomp Vida leads the narrator along on his hero’s journey to Mexico like Virgil leading Dante through Hell, though actually its not quite that bad. Unless you consider airports and San Diego to be like Hell, which is entirely understandable, than the analogy may be a little more legit.

This is a minimalist story. In fact the plot is so minimal that it is hardly worth mentioning. The actual abortion is almost a non-event in the narration. It is tempting to think of the abortion as a McGuffin, a plot device that has no actual meaning because the story is about the people, not the device. Dashiell Hammet was the master of the McGuffin; see The Thin Man or The Maltese Falcon. Laura Palmer in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks is another classic example of a McGuffin. But then again, Vida’s abortion may only be a partial McGuffin after all; the abortion can be seen in a symbolic way too. It is the sacrifice of the fetus, the removal of it from her womb, that brings the narrator out of his womb, the library where is living the life of the living dead like the books that Foster guards in his cave. The death of the fetus means rebirth for him. Don’t forget that “vida”, dervied from the Latin word “vita”, is Spanish for “life”. It is through Vida’s love that the narrator gets reborn to the world. He has gone through the cycle of the hero’s journey by entering the underworld, the library, doing the kind of unenviable task that heroes do like Hercules cleaning out the stables, going on a hero’s journey which involves accompanying Vida to the illegal abortion clinic in Tijuana, and re-emerging into the world with a newfound love for live. This is the life and death cycle, the dance between eros and thanatos, the eternal rebirth that permeates so much of ancient mythology.

The dry humor, the simplistic language, the vivid descriptiveness, and the sentences that, ahem, are pregnant with meaning all speak for themselves. They are the work of a genius wordsmith. The trio of the narrator, Vida, and Foster remind me a bit of Jim Jarmusch’s classic conedy of understatement Stranger Than Paradise in which a female outsider arrives on the scene and draws the two male characters out of their humdrum lives. In the end, it all comes off as literary playfulness, linguistic craftsmanship, celebratory youthfulness, light surrealism, a roman a clef, and confessional writing masked as an inside joke.

It is hard to tell if these mythical themes in The Abortion are intentional or not. There was a lot about Richard Brautigan’s mind that was unfathomable to the people who knew him. But he wasn’t lacking in knowledge even if he did choose to approach life with the eyes of a child. He might have accidentally tapped into the archetypes present in the writing, but it is hard to deny that those patterns are there. Some readers might scoff at the idea that there is anything of significance in this novel, but they are the ones who obviously don’t get it. The loftiness is there if you choose to see it.