Exactly
a century ago, economist Max Weber wrote a treatise
on what’s become known in English as ‘the
Protestant work ethic’. The accumulation of
capital, Weber proposed, accrued from the commitment
of early Protestants towards thrift, industry, and
husbandry, inculcated by their interpretation of
the Gospel and their diligence to labour hard in
this life so as to earn reward in the next. Accompanying
these gains, their sincere efforts to erect a ‘city
on the hill’, an example for all to follow
as their prosperity on earth anticipated a divine
approval, moved some, in England by the early 1630s,
to advance the attainment of an earthly realm that
would presage the New Jerusalem for which they yearned
in the afterlife. This is when Ronan Bennett begins
his chronicle, based on the extant records of an
‘inquisitor’ in the West Riding of Yorkshire,
John Brigge, working as what we today would label
as a coroner. A former Belfast IRA volunteer and
prisoner, author of not only three previous novels
but (unlisted in the credits) co-author of Paul
Hill’s memoir Stolen Years, the writer
enlivens this fiction with a lively and sustained
inquiry into the nature of guilt and the possibility
of rehabilitation. His novel cloaks beneath its
action and machinations serious meditations upon
fidelity, personal and to a cause. Bennett’s
main character, apparently based on his doctoral
research while he studied after prison at King’s
College, London, strives mightily to put Brigge’s
crisis of conscience into terms that we, nearing
four centuries later, can understand and appreciate.
In
his preface to Havoc, the author 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 against an England long surrendered
to a united Church and Crown. He represents the
faction pleading for mercy. Those against him argue
successfully and relentlessly for the triumph of
justice. In the north of England, those of the laurel
are threatened by those brandishing the blue ribbon,
a contingent eager to back the former despot, who
seeks to reclaim his control of the city against
the evangelical reformers who had campaigned for
a cleansing of sin on a more populist platform,
but who themselves appear more and more tempted
towards the rule of the bridle, the stocks, and
the gibbet as anarchy from those without home or
work, who in their encampments—along with the
hidden minions of the Pope--threaten their northern
land, three years running.
Bennett
eschews stereotypes, at least in his narrative’s
start. He subtly presents the battle of Brigge—informed
by a Catholic tolerance of sin—against his
Protestant peers, who seek to oust him from a role
as a city counselor, suspicious of his recusancy,
his reluctance to apply the rod and not spoil the
child, and his wish to withdraw from municipal contention
to succour his wife, recently delivered of their
ailing son. 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.
Later
in the novel, as the Puritan contigent closes in
around the dissident Brigge, the omniscient narrator
steps aside from his mouthpiece to reflect: ‘There
is no better way for a man to get an advantage over
another than by seeing him in his house with his
wife.’ Such commonplaces, rather sinister often,
reflect Bennett’s deft ability to conjure up
menace and insight neatly. His previous novel, The
Catastrophist, set similar tension within the
precarious political and natural terrain of Lumumba’s
Congo; here, the author takes us into an even more
estranged wilderness from our own, if superficially
closer to our own landscape.
In
the 1630s or the 1960s, however, the essential conflict
endures. Brigge asserts that ‘men must have
mercy, for without mercy we are savages.’ (172)
His opponent, ruler of the city, counters: ‘Without
law we descend to the level of the beasts, The law
shall decide when mercy is to be given and when
it is to be withheld.’ Still, Brigge holds
out for humanism, and weakness: ‘The heart
decides. The heart informed not by law but by sympathy
and love. I am now more than ever convinced that
an eye that is sometimes blind sees more justly
than one that is sharp.’ (174) But, Brigge’s
humanity cannot withstand the force of law and the
conspiracies that join those of the laurel and the
blue ribbon against him. The city consolidates its
power around a coalition between former tyrant and
erstwhile progressive, and both assemble their adherents
against the Papist fifth column, in its dozens said
to be in its ten thousands to overthrow those committed
to the establishment of the City on the Hill, the
New Jerusalem, the true covenant of the Lord.
Haunted
through the story by the admonishment of an Irishwoman
whose innocence Brigge seeks to prove, her reminder
that Jesus instructed his apostles to go forth ‘harmless
as doves’ cannot be aligned against those who
also quote Christ’s terrible wrath against
doubters and naysayers. Brigge seeks to cling to
his version of the Gospels: ‘chaos beats in
man’s heart and is vital to it. It pulses its
loins, it swims in his dreams. Easier to tame the
wind than man, who is as turbulent, capricious,
obdurate and selfish as dread and doct professors
of religion maintain him to be, but also, which
they do less, loving, merciful and selfless. Who
knows better what man is that He who created man?’
(209) Like many who strive to spread the healing
nature of religious teaching, Brigge becomes trapped
by those who lash back with remorseless logic with
other verses vowing woe and damnation to those daring
to fall from the path of the righteous.
In
the end, a deus ex machina, or at least an
Act of God in actuarial jargon, frees Brigge from
imminent doom if for a short space. From this point
on, for me, the energy of the novel downshifted
into a more steady, but less gripping pace. Mental
states of confusion predominate, and the attention
of the protagonist becomes scattered, as the narrative
dissipates and the control of Brigge over his situation
slips away into the hands of his tormentors and
rescuers. In a premonition of future apocalyptic
urban fires, London in 1666, Manhattan in 2001,
the city in which Brigge faces death erupts into
flame. After the rain from heaven supplants the
fury from the skies, the narrator tells us that
the long-suffering coroner ‘heard the panting
of tyranny. He saw that in the town at last all
were now united where for so long they were warring
and at each other’s throats: the great merchants
and wealthy clothiers and drapers and yeomen with
poor laborers and spinners and tallow-makers. Some
lived well and some did not and some would eat tonight
and some would not, but differences of rank, wealth
and degree had melted in the fire. All were now
united and all would be revenged.’ (236) The
storyline then diffuses into a millenarian wish-fulfillment,
as the protagonist’s consciousness becomes
fuddled. Perhaps Bennett envisions a sequel to carry
on the mission of the Irishwoman, now crazed by
her incarceration? She leads into the forest a band
of pilgrims determined, as if Franciscan penitents
or fundamentalist born-agains, to lead a truly evangelical
life, outside of stone walls. By the conclusion
of Havoc, with no sign of abating in its
third year, the unrest continues, as Brigge predicts,
and no amount of arrests, persecution, or prosecution
seems to diminish criminals or sinners.
To
sum up, Bennett, as he had done in his own evocation
of imprisonment, The Second Prison, and The
Catastrophist—whose most gripping scene
remains for me three years after reading its protagonist’s
recovered memory of his own arrest and torture in
another North, that of Ireland—continues his
careful blend of popular, plot-driven storylines
with a more thoughtfully depicted array of characters
facing moral choice within complicated relationships,
sexual and professional. He knows how to pace his
fiction well, to engage sympathy while avoiding
stereotype, and to use period detail to illuminate
larger concerns. Although flawed, the marvelously
titled Havoc, in its third year comes heartily
recommended to you. And its opening quote remains
all too relevant, thanks to Goethe: ‘Mistrust
all in whom the desire to punish is imperative’.
However noble the cause, humanity, in this novel,
writhes hideously under its whip and noose.
