The Ink Trade: Selected Journalism 1961-1993 by Anthony Burgess

Author:Anthony Burgess [Burgess, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Collections, essays, European, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, General
ISBN: 9781784103934
Google: yYZXDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
Published: 2018-05-31T20:29:26.720319+00:00

Observer, 11 April 1982

Review of The Rash Act by Ford Madox Ford

(Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1982)

Medieval Sherlock

IT IS November 1327. The Franciscan monk from Oxford, accompanied by a Benedictine novice from Melk, arrives at an Italian monastery: ‘His height surpassed that of a normal man and he was so thin that he seemed still taller. His eyes were sharp and penetrating; his thin and slightly beaky nose gave his countenance the expression of a man on the lookout…’

When we hear that his name is William of Baskerville we at once suspect that he is a preincarnation of Sherlock Holmes, especially since he is coming to investigate a series of crimes at the abbey. We are convinced when he divines that a number of anxious servants are searching for the abbot’s strayed horse – ‘fifteen hands, the fastest in your stables, with a dark coat, a full tail, small round hoofs, but a very steady gait; small head, sharp ears, big eyes.’ He also guesses that the name of the horse is Brunellus. How, asks his Benedictine companion, can he know all this? Elementary, my dear Adso: ‘One of the blackberry bushes… still held some long black horsehairs in its brambles.’ And so on. And why, Brunellus? ‘What other name could he possibly have? Why, even the great Buridan, who was about to become rector in Paris, when he wants to use a horse in one of his logical examples, always calls it Brunellus.’

So we seem to have then a kind of game or joke, the transplantation of the sleuth of Baker Street to medieval Italy, not so much of a game or joke if you have read (which Dr Eco probably hasn’t) Owen Dudley Edward’s biography of Conan Doyle, in which he presents convincing evidence that Sherlock Holmes is the product of a Jesuit education. Of course, the Jesuits didn’t exist in William of Baskerville’s time, but – learned in Aquinas and Aristotle and prepared to use the empirical techniques of Roger Bacon – William would make a very good English Jesuit. Although in orders, he lacks the rotundity, Wildean paradoxicality and compassion of Father Brown, but clearly Dr Eco knows his Chesterton. Theology and criminal detection go, for some reason, well together.

The first crimes are purely theological – mere (mere?) heresy – but then monks start mysteriously to die. It takes Williams a good 490 pages to discover the single motivation behind what are obviously cold-blooded murders – he is a slower worker than Holmes and his creator is not writing for the Strand Magazine. Moreover, the motivation is of a subtlety that forbids even the most educated guesswork, and some of the clues are in Latin.

The novel is much too complex and interesting in its non-narrative substance to make a reviewer shy of disclosing the denouement. This has to do with a book in the abbey library which the librarian, who is blind and devout and not an obvious suspect, does not wish his fellow monks to see – or, if they do see it, they had better not survive.

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