Last night I finished reading “All Things Are Lights,” by Robert Shea.
This book is set during the Albigensian Crusade of the 13th century, and Louis IX’s failed crusade to Egypt. I’ve read two others historical fictions by Shea, his Japanese epic “Shike” and his “Saracen” books, both of which I considered excellent. Shea has very little in the way of a personal style, and, as a prosist, I would even call him weak; however, his skill at storytelling more than compensates for that.
His style is bland, yet effective. He errs on the side of under-writing. But that’s not the main draw in his novels. His characters are well-developed and interesting, his use of history is compelling, and his eye for the moral question is masterful.
His novels are subversive in that way. One picks them up expecting sword-filled entertainment, and instead you get heartfelt meditations on violence. Even when he writes about a very narrow era - ten years of medieval France, in this book - Shea seems to address the whole of human history, and particularly the problem of violence in history. He writes of wars and bloody battles, and it’s exciting and well-depicted, but he makes you question the necessity of violence at every turn.
This leads to the creation of an odd sort of protagonist. His heroes usually begin as typical warriors or soldiers, but begin to question their actions and the actions of their enemies through the course of the story. By the end they are conscientious to a fault. If they slay their mortal enemies, they do it as a sad necessity. Or, if they are defeated, they accept it stoically. For, by the end of the book, they have grown past the need for violence as a solution, though they remain mired in a world that understands nothing else. It’s a strange fit in a genre that usually has no qualms about mass deaths; indeed, a genre that revels in violence. How many works of historical fiction are there that aren’t about war?
Shea’s approach to the problem of violence in human history is refreshingly mature, and makes an interesting foil to Sabatini’s supermen.
As for “All Things Are Light” in particular, I found it superior to “The Saracen,” behind “Shike.” The plot is well-executed, and the history is used to good effect; I have since worked the Cathars into “Papillion”. The characters, as usual, all have compelling motivations and desires, making for a gripping read.
A note on the text. My copy was purchased on lulu.com. Since the original book had gone out of print, Robert Shea’s son released it under a Creative Commons license as print-on-demand. The title page tells me that it was formatted with Open Office, and the text was riddled with typos and formatting errors - question marks instead of em-dashes, pronouns gender-switched, breaks where there should not be breaks, and vice versa. It was a jarring read. However, I get the impression that Mike Shea and maybe a friend or two typed the whole thing by hand into Open Office, working from an old hard copy, so I can’t hold the errors against them. I’m indebted to the work he (or they) invested so that others could read this beautiful book.
Now I’m reading: “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” by Ray Bradbury. Usually, while writing a novel, I try to read books from which I can take something for my own novel. However, in this work, Bradbury writes so supremely that there is nothing I can use. I feel like a finger-painting chimp studying Rembrandt.
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