osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2017-10-31 11:48 am
osprey_archer) wrote2017-10-31 11:48 am
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Book Review: The Inquisitor's Tale
Let me be real with you: when I read that Adam Gidwitz’s The Inquisitor’s Tale: Or, Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog featured a Jewish boy, a black oblate (his crusader father fell in love with a Saracen maiden and sent the resulting bastard to an abbey in France), and a French peasant girl who has vision-inducing fits a la Joan of Arc, I instantly developed the twitchy suspicion that at some point in the novel the holy children would tell someone to “check your privilege” and then probably high five, as if they were the heroes of a clickbait-y Tumblr social justice post. And then there would be a long digression about how the past was The Worst.
Reader, it is not like that. In fact I quite liked it. I loved the way that Gidwitz wove medieval history & legends into his own story (and it seems particularly appropriate for a medieval story, as medieval storytellers were great borrowers themselves). He’s clearly deeply steeped in research about the Middle Ages; this especially evident in the character of William, the voraciously intelligent oblate who has read most of the books in his monastery and discusses them at the drop of a hat.
I didn’t think the fantasy elements were entirely successful, and Gidwitz is not exactly subtle in his moralizing, but he is at least not totally sledge-hammery and it’s mostly done in a period-appropriate manner. No one ever shouts “Check your privilege!” while the onlookers applaud.
And he clearly loves the Middle Ages, warts and all. As he puts it in his author’s note, it was “an amazing, vibrant, dynamic period” - which one could say about pretty much any period of history, of course - but it’s the hallmark of bad historical fiction to see other eras as largely static, aside from a few free-thinking young people who have managed somehow to achieve totally modern mores.
People had a range of opinions in the past! Give your heroes the most progressive opinions of their time period if you want to - although anyone as radical as all that is likely to pay some social cost; "Miss Emily is a nice girl but she's so pungent on the woman suffrage question; it makes church picnics so awkward" - but don’t pretend that’s going to make them speak modern progressive social-justice-ese!
...I think I post some version of this rant every single time I write about historical fiction. I may have been rewriting this rant over and over since I was about fourteen. Maybe I need a new hobby.
Reader, it is not like that. In fact I quite liked it. I loved the way that Gidwitz wove medieval history & legends into his own story (and it seems particularly appropriate for a medieval story, as medieval storytellers were great borrowers themselves). He’s clearly deeply steeped in research about the Middle Ages; this especially evident in the character of William, the voraciously intelligent oblate who has read most of the books in his monastery and discusses them at the drop of a hat.
I didn’t think the fantasy elements were entirely successful, and Gidwitz is not exactly subtle in his moralizing, but he is at least not totally sledge-hammery and it’s mostly done in a period-appropriate manner. No one ever shouts “Check your privilege!” while the onlookers applaud.
And he clearly loves the Middle Ages, warts and all. As he puts it in his author’s note, it was “an amazing, vibrant, dynamic period” - which one could say about pretty much any period of history, of course - but it’s the hallmark of bad historical fiction to see other eras as largely static, aside from a few free-thinking young people who have managed somehow to achieve totally modern mores.
People had a range of opinions in the past! Give your heroes the most progressive opinions of their time period if you want to - although anyone as radical as all that is likely to pay some social cost; "Miss Emily is a nice girl but she's so pungent on the woman suffrage question; it makes church picnics so awkward" - but don’t pretend that’s going to make them speak modern progressive social-justice-ese!
...I think I post some version of this rant every single time I write about historical fiction. I may have been rewriting this rant over and over since I was about fourteen. Maybe I need a new hobby.
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