I haven’t posted much lately due to winter torpor, Covid (which I caught recently), severe back pain after a fall, my other responsibilities (including a skin cancer diagnostics book I am working on) and lack of inspiration.
The horror of events in Ukraine have affected me, and made me think about a novel I started writing some years ago but which like my other creative writing projects is stuck. about 8,000 words in all so far. I am getting back into French, partly by reading a French-English side by side Bible. So here is a recent edit of the preface to ‘Fire on the Dordogne’ which is intended as a historical/theological romance set during the French Wars of Religion. This may or may not be of the slightest interest to anyone. Feel free to comment, including hostile comments if you like.
Preface: Fire on the Dordogne (a story).
Preface
The idea for this novel came to me on a visit to the Chateau of Monbazillac, just outside Bergerac in the middle Dordogne. Julia and I were visiting the castle, more interested in the luscious ‘noble rot’ sweet golden wine of that appellation, that goes so well with ripe Doyenne du Comice pears. We were not enquiring into history, but the history came at us whether we were looking for it or not.
Specialising early in sciences in order to follow a medical career, I had never learned much history even of my own country, but had often heard the phrase ‘wars of religion’ used, often generically. Growing up as a Roman Catholic, I had been fed a version of history in which evil Protestants tortured and murdered innocent Catholic saints and martyrs and the Reformation had all been about Henry the Eighth wanting a divorce and to raid the monasteries’ gold and treasure. It was interesting to be in an actual castle in the region where those particular wars that history generally meant by that phrase had raged in 16th century France. And, of course, for many in our supposedly enlightened age, the very phrase ‘Wars of Religion’ is intended as an ‘I rest my case!’ conversation stopper should anyone dare mention God or Christ.
So there I was, in a castle which I had visited to taste delicacies, reading about how men and women just like Julia and I had been caught up in those very wars, and their blood spilled and their homes abandoned, just for what they believed. What drama! What horror! What if by fate or providence you had been caught up in such times and, like it or not, had no choice but to pick a side? To face the reality described by George Orwell who wrote in his ‘Homage to Catalonia’ memoir of the Spanish civil war in which he fought and was wounded, ‘Those who take up the sword die by the sword, those who don’t take up the sword die by smelly diseases.’
And the spectre and stench of religious war is now rising again in the post-modern world since the events of September 2001, and indeed since the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948 (called the ‘Nakba’ or disaster by Arabs and Muslims). Many men and women with their children being forced to emigrate because of an intolerant faith-based power, and indeed men who seem Hell-bent on fighting, well, because. I once read a piece of feminist graffiti cited in Private Eye which said ‘Men must like wars, or they wouldn’t keep having them.’
Interestingly, we see Buddhist persecution of Muslims in Myanmar today, in contradiction of the words of an infuriated dinner party guest who once, in a tirade against Christianity, said ‘No Buddhists have ever started a war of religion!’ I expect there is more to the conflict in Myanmar than a difference of belief, but with the journalists who are brave enough to venture into the Rohingya region being arrested or disappeared, I guess we will never learn the full story And thereby hangs a tale. As I looked out of the window of the gallery over the Dordogne vineyards of lovely Sauvignon and Semillon grapes grew, I wondered what tales those castle walls could tell.
With the story of the French Huguenots, many of whom were independent minded and skilled artisans and professionals whose immigration undoubtedly benefited the countries which received them, all but forgotten, I thought there was a tale to be told of these times. No history student, I visited the river cities Bergerac and Cahors which had been on opposite sides in the French wars of religion country and did some research, at least that’s my excuse.
I began writing this at the window of a rural gite in the Lot looking out over a small orchard to wooded hills beyond. As I edit this, I am planning to drive over those hills to visit the mountain shrine of Rocamadour, which used to be a notable place of pilgrimage. A Catholic online source I viewed yesterday (3rd May 2016) admits that the supposedly miraculous stories around which the shrine was established were now known for certain to be entirely bogus. But these miracles, and the sainted personalities responsible for them, were very real in the times when I have set this work of fiction. Some men felt them real enough to kill for.
Writers, like everyone else, have points of view and maybe other motives than just to tell a good tale and maybe get some royalties or respect. In my medical culture, it is mandatory for researchers and teachers to disclose their sources of information and any potentially competing interests, so I must declare the significant interest that I was born and raised a Catholic and am now of the Reformed Christian faith. This book is not intended as a thinly disguised Protestant tract, it is a novel which I hope will entertain as well as inform, but I won’t insult the reader’s intelligence by pretending that I am not a partisan. I hate it when people pretend to be unbiased when in fact they have a strong bias and agenda. As a Catholic boy, I was taught a partial version of history which I now recognise as being at best highly selective, at worst grossly dishonest. I have a dog in the fight.
Discovering that you have been deceived by those you trusted most, and I hope I say this without rancour or ingratitude above all to my honourable parents, is unsettling. But having experienced the most profound change of mind after encountering a different set of facts, I saw I had no rational alternative but to conclude that I had been systematically misled by a power that sought to control me. And if I, over that, then why not others, over that and much else? In fact, since many human tribes bring up their young on incompatibly different versions of events, the experience of being deceived from childhood must by definition be a common one, wherever the truth lies. Surely this is something we ought to think soberly about.
It is a terrible thing to consider that the deceived are often entirely unaware of their condition, in fact are positively certain that they alone have the truth. If A thinks that B and C are deluded, and they return the favour, then what if we are A and we are culpably, deeply and dangerously wrong? This should frighten us more than it does. As I edit this neglected text in March 2022, cities are being levelled in Ukraine and some people are talking about World War 3 kicking off. Many support the Ukrainians and see them as purely innocent victims, but others assert that there were provocations and that the mainstream news is whitewashing one side and demonising the other. What is the real truth? I don’t know. But I do know that I have been lied to before now by those I ought to have been able to trust.
Knowing what I know, or should I better say convinced of what I am convinced of, I look around me and see the same all over, and not just in the case of theistic religion, let alone different sects within Christianity. The fires of sectarian war have burned, are burning, and will burn. And it’s not just religious faith-tribalism, acquisitiveness, political philosophies, psychopathy and other dark sides of the human condition have also played their part. Billy Joel’s song ‘We didn’t start the fire’ contains salutary reflections on this sorry reality. And as a character in one of Tom Clancy’s novels said ‘What is war but armed robbery writ large?’. The desire to enrich oneself by robbing one’s neighbour is an old one. The Ten Commandments (Exodus chapter 20) forbid murder, theft and coveting your neighbour’s goods. It also forbids lying. The person who wages unjust war against his neighbour breaks all of these commandments, and also the greatest commandments, to love God and one’s neighbour.
This is a historical novel, a romance if you like. The author hopes that he has made a reasonable attempt to be accurate about major historical facts that are documented, but has taken the usual liberties over details. Guillaume de Bourianne, his son Jean, and the other protagonists on both sides and the middle in this tale have no obligation to be accurate in the words the author has put into their mouths. They will have been wrong about many things, however sincerely. Like us, they will have been brought up on misleading tribal legends and partial versions of history, they will have been ignorant of significant facts, and they will have been fed fake news. When the fake news agreed with their prejudices and reinforced their comfort zone, they will have swallowed it readily and passed it on eagerly, sometimes with embellishment. The propensity of we humans to get things wrong and to continue in our error without insight, regardless of evidence and consequence, is perhaps the main moral substance of the book. PS I might be wrong! But the ideas still need articulating.
Old Hampshire C S Lewis Society 