|
|
|
The Nameless Day: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
ara Douglass is Australia's most popular fantasy writer. Tor Books has introduced her work to America with the Wayfarer Redemption series, the stand-alone novel Threshold and the Troy Game series. Her latest novel in America is The Nameless Day, the first volume of the Crucible series.
On the Nameless Day, a seraphically selected friar conducts the secret rituals that seal the Cleft: the gateway to hell. When a guardian grows old, the angels announce the world's new guardian to the pope. However, the latest guardian, Brother Wynkyn de Worde, fears he will be the last. The current pope is the French king's godless puppet, so the angels cannot name Brother Wynkyn's successor. Wynkyn is old, the world is mired in wickedness, and the Black Plague—surely God's punishment—is killing off half the population of Europe. The end of the world is near.
Traveling north from Rome to the forest-shrouded Cleft, Brother Wynkyn catches the plague. At the gate of hell, he collapses and is surrounded by 30 demons. Before he can return them to hell, Wynkyn dies. The demons hide among mortals, disguised as angelically beautiful children orphaned by the Pestilence.
But, before his death, Wynkyn was visited by the archangel Michael. They conducted a ritual to ensure the conception of a righteous man to close the Cleft and oppose the hordes of hell. That man is Sir Thomas Neville, a Dominican friar. Brother Thomas receives angelic visions, and has been joined in St. Michael's service by a peasant girl, Joan of Arc. Yet Thomas may fail to close the gate of hell. He cannot find Wynkyn's book of rituals, necessary to seal the Cleft. The demons (now adults) know of his quest and seek to end it. Europe is mired in the Hundred Years War. Kings and princes are dying in uncanny ways. The final battle between heaven and hell draws near. And, terrifyingly, Thomas finds himself suspecting that the side of the angels may be the wrong side.
Genuinely medieval
The Nameless Day is medieval fantasy. For experienced fans, this description can raise memories of prettified, sanitized, laughable evocations of the Middle Ages. However, Sara Douglass' novel is set squarely in the Dark Ages of the bubonic plague and the Hundred Years War. Without wallowing in that era's mud and blood, she demonstrates believably just how grim, violent, frightening and astonishing the 14th century was.
Douglass' fantasy takes the form of an alternate history, one in which the medieval Christian worldview is literalized. She creates a generally convincing portrait of a Dark Ages in which angels and demons are at war on Earth. Her portrayal succeeds because it is true to the time.
Many high-fantasy and historical-fiction authors give their lead characters the anachronistic beliefs and attitudes of modern readers. Douglass doesn't make that mistake. Her main characters are genuinely medieval. Brother Wynkyn unselfconsciously believes sex is evil and the Black Plague is God's just punishment. Brother Thomas, the high-born protagonist, is a self-righteous moral prig who sincerely believes women and commoners are inferior. Yet he's always sympathetic, because Douglass provides solid sociocultural and personal reasons for his beliefs. A few characters have more modern views, but they are seen as—and may be—demons or tools of demons. If later volumes of the Crucible trilogy adjust the protagonist's attitude to a more modern pitch, Book One presents believable reasons for Thomas to doubt, grow and change.
Other characters are not as well realized as Thomas. The problem may be the large cast, which is mostly determined by history (there are enough Plantagenets alone to strain the skills of an Ursula K. Le Guin or J.R.R. Tolkien). Fortunately, the appended glossary includes the players. Despite its overpopulation problem, The Nameless Day is clear and absorbing, and most of its American readers will eagerly await the domestic publication of the sequels.
I hope this series about an alternate-history Armageddon brings Sara Douglass at least a portion of the Left Behind readership. She's a writer almost infinitely more skilled than Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. — Cynthia
Also in this issue: Iron Council, by China Miéville
|
 |
|
| Home |
Copyright © 1998-2006, Science Fiction Weekly (TM). All rights reserved. Reproduction in any medium strictly prohibited. Maintained by scifiweekly@scifi.com. |
