John The Pupil

Summary (from the publisher): Since he was a young boy, John has studied at the Franciscan monastery outside Oxford, under the tutelage of friar and magus Roger Bacon, an inventor, scientist, and polymath. In 1267, Bacon arranges for his young pupil to embark on a journey of penitence to Italy. But the pilgrimage is a guise to deliver scientific instruments and Bacon's great opus to His Holiness, Pope Clement IV. Two companions will accompany John, both Franciscan friars: the handsome, sweet-tempered Brother Andres, with whom everyone falls in love; and the more brutish Brother Bernard, with his secret compulsion for drawing imaginary monsters. Neither know the true purpose of their expedition.

 

John the Pupil is a medieval road movie, recounting the journey taken from Oxford to Viterbo in 1267 by John and his two companions. Modeling themselves after Saint Francis, the trio treks by foot through Europe, preaching the gospel and begging for sustenance. In addition to fighting off ambushes from thieves hungry for the thing of power they are carrying, the holy trio are tried and tempted by all sorts of sins: ambition, pride, lust - and by the sheer hell and heaven of medieval life.

 

Erudite and earthy, horrifying, comic, and humane - Umberto Eco seen through the eyes of Quentin Tarantino - David Flusfeder's extraordinary novel reveals to the reader a world very different from, and all too like, the one we live in now.

 

Review: I won an uncorrected proof copy of this novel as a Goodreads giveaway.

 

This work of historical fiction is the story of John the Pupil, who in 1267 is charged by his master at the monastery to take his great work to the pope. John is able to take two companions with him, but he has lived at the monastery for most of his life and the world beyond represents evils and temptations beyond anything he has experienced. John and his companions experience violence, kindness, lust, and a variety of other worldly experiences while on the road.

 

Flusfeder has created an elaborate frame story for his novel to make it as closely identical to a work of non-fiction as possible. This includes a "Note on the Text" section that explains that the following work is a manuscript found among the collection of one Augustus Jessopp in the nineteenth century that the editor has translated and whose fragments he has arranged as closely as possible. "The mistakes that have been made here are the editor-translator's own: I am not a historian or a philologist, just a worker in language, whose path to John's manuscript has been an unlikely one that need not interrupt the reader's attention" (xv). This seems like a blatant tongue-in-check message from the author about how he stumbled upon this fictional story that he has packaged as a non-fictional text. 

 

The accompanying chronicle of John's story is John's first hand account of his story - a journal of his quest - arranged not by date but by Saint's Day. John typically spends some time recounting the saint for which each day is named before an account of his own day's events. In the notes section that follow John's account, the "translator" says that "one assumes that this first time that John has given us a summary of the acts of the saint whose day it is represents a youthful ambition: he writes of adventures that he hopes will prefigure his own" (206). Thus through his own journey, John is building his own story of adventure and heroism, which previously he was only able to read about.

 

Despite its pretensions, this novel does not, of course, read exactly like a manuscript from the thirteenth century. John is much too introspective and detailed, and the language (despite the "translator's" attempt to use "only words that would have been known to John") does not read like the formal, stilted writing of that century. However, in the notes, Flusfeder writes, "All historical novels are failures or, at best, metaphors, dressing up the present day in anachronistic disguise" (212). So is this novel a farce? Or a metaphor? I can't help but feeling that this whole book is an elaborate tease - of the author of his readers - an elaborate ruse to force the reader to contemplate historical fiction in general and John's story as its relates to our own, in particular.

 

While John's quest experiences many setbacks and deviations, ultimately it helps him learn more about himself than he ever could under the tutelage of his masters at the monastery. "The journey I am making now is a mirror of the contemplative journey I took at the friary; and there is another, higher one that mirrors this, from above, and which I was closer to in the schoolroom" (172).

 

Stars: 3