Like Authority, Uproar and Heresy, Vol II of The Latecoming West, started slowly for me. Unlike that work of speculative fiction, it was not a completely new setting with a completely new character--though it actually does include an element of that--but for the most part, it is a continuation of Volume I.
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A.P. Andes is unlikely to reach J.K. Rowling-levels of wealth and fame, or even Jeff VanderMeer-levels, but The Latecoming West surely could be adapted into a powerful limited series, with the right context. For one it is quasi-religious programming, which has a certain viewership of sometimes incredible numbers. The problem is that this story is not a straightforward depiction of Catholic faith--it is an exploration of the entire religious order, and a dismantling of it to a degree.
Further relevance could be staked on controversial "rad-trad" beliefs percolating in conservative circles. Such individuals reject the framework of Vatican II and prefer the older traditions of the Catholic Church. This is, understandably, something of a moot point. "Rad trads" do not opine on Pope Joan. In fact, very few people opine on Pope Joan.
The most famous Joan is St. Joan of Arc and plenty of people know about her. Not all Popes become Saints, but sometimes they do. Pope Joan, in her depiction here at least, is no saint. She is a kind and benevolent and good person, but she is not a saint insofar as she is committing a fraud against the Church and also engaging in "relations" outside of marriage. The Latecoming West asks, to a degree, what is so wrong about that, and why we have these arbitrary rules that are often manipulated by those in power to suit their own sometimes nefarious ends. The hypocrisy of "true believers" subjugating women while they maintain their own authority and dictate rules to live by to all but themselves (in certain cases) is apparently impossible to illuminate, and that persistent frustration remains relevant today. The end result of The Latecoming West could be Catholic reform, and while I am sure Andes would welcome that, I do not believe he has such grandiose goals with his work.
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It may sound dismissive to say the first half of the book went more slowly for me, and that it does not break much further new ground than Volume I, but it would have been worse to close out the Lorsch section of the chronicle without providing full context. While some of the material on the Gnostics and other heretical sects of Christianity is a natural outgrowth of those explorations in Volume I, for some reason those studies feel less important to Joan than being with Clovis. And it feels less important to the overall narrative in general. I still enjoyed these sections but they did not "connect" with me quite as strongly as in Vol I, because the "suspicion" narrative overtook it. Vol I. felt more like a bildungsroman for Joan, "worldview-building," for lack of a better term, charting her intellectual growth and assimilation into the monastic life at Lorsch. She has fears of being discovered, but that anxiety is outweighed by the exhilaration she finds in the "hidden texts" of the library. Clovis saves her life, and then helps her make it to Lorsch, and then basically exits the novel, until re-emerging in the opening of Vol II, for a potential tryst which is thwarted by an all-female pagan celebration/ritual ("Samhain") in the night. She is hurt rather badly--beaten and sexually assaulted--and she is mad at Clovis for not realizing the danger of meeting up that night (perhaps a precursor to Halloween), and he is mad at her for flaking on him, until he hears her story. Though this is a traumatic episode that humiliates and frightens her, she goes along with it out of desperation. And later in the novel, this "motif" appears again, in a far more benevolent context (in the character of Alcippe, who feels like an avatar for Sappho, or perhaps a Greek goddess, in a setting that feels like the Island of Lesbos), and introduces a layer of sexual fluidity to her character, which feels inevitable. Joan contains multitudes, and her various journeys and awakenings in this volume more deeply establish her as a Queer archetype. Though the prospect of heterosexual domesticity with Clovis is clearly available, both he and her recognize she is destined for "greater things," and so instead she remains an "imposter" and subsumes pretty much every identity in the LGBT-alphabet while remaining terrified of being "outed."
At a certain point Clovis obtains a post and a private room at the monastery, part-time, and while it makes sense that he could strike such a bargain (and the scene where he demonstrates his leverage over Father Abbot is one of the best moments in the book), it seems primarily aimed at advancing the plot. Of course, this is the closest Joan comes to having "the best of both worlds," and probably her happiest moments, but they are all suffused with anxiety and ultimately lead to her undoing, through which she once again survives only because of him. For me at least, the impact of that relationship on her feels more prominent than the impact of the scholasticism that made her love the routines of the monastic life as depicted in Volume I. It felt as though the developments of this section of the novel leave her distracted and confused and ambivalent about whatever "God's plan" may hold for her.
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John the Angelic included a highly noticeable "WTF" element, with channel changing between the History Channel and VH-1 (albeit more academic musical programming) and 1980's movie scenes, which felt inexplicable, but added a level of intrigue to the novel. I am not sure it "worked" and it seemed to be deployed at random.
This is noticeably absent from Uproar and Heresy, and in its place is a more fully-realized counternarrative, which is arguably more compelling than the primary one. This is the story of the meet-cute between Rahel and Patek in Germany in 1933 and events unfolding over the next seven or so years of their lives. They are Polish Jews, and they are eventually forced to return there. They witness the rise of Hitler, and while Rahel initially feels exuberant and hopeful about the future of the country, Patek sees the writing on the wall, so to speak, and these portions of the novel feel especially relevant today, not only with the bloodshed between Israel and Palestine, but the presence of an authoritarian impulse in our home country (and many others springing up elsewhere). There is a cliche about history that is often applied to Holocaust narratives, i.e. those that do not know it are doomed to repeat it, and while there has been near-perennial "Oscar bait" that is based in this era in the 30 years since Schindler's List (with The Zone of Interest fulfilling that quota most recently), it sadly bears repeating. The horrors are simply unmatched, and the inhumanity is both astounding and perplexing.
7.5 years ago, we had occasion to review The Paris Architect. I would say it is on equal footing with Uproar & Heresy--if popularity with audiences is on equal footing with artistic merit (a complicated question in 2024, or any time, as the potential return on investment often becomes the key metric in determining whether a work of art can reach a wider audience). On the whole, Uproar has a more profound message, even if it feels a bit muddled. It reaches greater intellectual heights, but its focus is bifurcated. And really, it is more like 80% Joan, and 20% Rahel and Patek. The Paris Architect was not a great novel, but reasonably entertaining with more of a "thriller" element, limited, and neat. It was about an architect building secret rooms to hide Jews in Paris. It was enormously popular. It was optioned for a film adaption in 2016, and that project is either stalled or abandoned.
I have no doubt that had Uproar and Heresy maintained focus on this narrative, it would have been superior to The Paris Architect, and would find a larger audience and greater commercial success. But there is no "hook" to give it narrative heft, beyond its apparent connection to the Pope Joan narrative. Even so, being limited perhaps to 40 pages out of the 200 in this book, it is far more compelling in its historical-political accuracy:
"'Look at how he came to power,' he pointed out, counting out the dates on his fingers. 'The day after he is named chancellor, on the thirty-first of January, 1933, he promises the German people a parliamentary democracy. Yet the very next day, he dissolves Parliament. On the 2nd of February, he forbids all meetings of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands and undertakes a systematic search and seizure of their munitions. Two days later, on the fourth of February, Hindenburg--no doubt at Hitler's bidding--restricts freedom of the press." (92)
"'Do you think because he's the head of our government, he won't kill people? Listen--' Patek was furious and started a sentence three different times before taking a breath and speaking with calm deliberation. 'You need to understand how this man looks at human beings, and Jewish human beings in particular. Have you read Mein Kampf?
Rahel shook her head.
'Hitler categorises mankind into three groups: the founders of culture, the bearers of culture and the destroyers of culture. For him, the Aryan race is the sole member of the first group. The Japanese and Latins are examples of the second group, who are capable of maintaining a culture that has already been created but lack the nobility and genius to create one on their own initiative. Then we come to the third group: those who will destroy culture through their greed, malice, cowardice and ineptitude. In this class belongs the Jews and the Negroes. It is in essence a subhuman classification, and the laws that Hitler has put into place are the perfect logical, legal expression of such a status.'" (96-97)
Perhaps being a counter-narrative itself is its own "hook," and in any case, it works better than the "alternative" aspect to Vol I. As the stakes are raised as the 1930's proceed, when the narrative jumps back to Joan, she is finally leaving Lorsch and moving onto the next phase of her journey, which is an expedition to Greece to a new monastery with Clovis. (I am wary of spoiling either narrative and all I will say is that both pick up and the 2nd half of the novel is probably the best overall "section" of the tetralogy to this point, even if certain sections of Vol I. stretch towards more profound heights). But it begs the question, as in its predecessor: what is the connection?
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One morning in Stockholm with a traveling companion in late August, we were enjoying fika while I perused these pages, and I read from a certain section and asked my friend, who takes deeper academic interest in history, religion and culture than me, what he thought the connection would be.
Well, he said, the Nazis knew the truth about Pope Joan. They had proof that she had existed and reigned as Pope and been white-washed as Pope Johannes, and they were preparing to release such information until they had been defeated and such proof was discovered and hidden again to protect the Church.
He spoke as if this was common knowledge, or perhaps he was just extrapolating some connection that he could divine from what I had said about the book over the previous days. It is not a spoiler to say such a connection is not depicted in Vol II, and there is not even a "hint" towards the connection.
Does the plight of Rahel and Patek mirror the plight of Pope Joan, the forced exile from Germany akin to the exile from Lorsch? I don't think so, because the departure from Lorsch is not nearly as involuntary. Are they demonized for their Jewish background as she is demonized for her gender? Not as unthinkably, in her case. Does the German government's treatment of the Jewish people in this era mirror the Catholic Church's treatment of Joan? Not quite because Joan would be more of an "embarrassment," with the Church pretending that never happened, and while there are unhinged Holocaust-deniers out there still, Germany itself has done what it can to disavow its part in the most evil moment on human history--it doesn't pretend it never happened.
And so my friend's theory--unlikely and fantastical though it may be--is arguably the most plausible, and one that lends itself best to fiction. The problem is it posits such Nazis as champions of truth, which is impossible to believe. I am not clear why they would want to destroy the Church, and what the actual impact would be of such a revelation. It does not seem like it would make a very big difference in 1945, or even in 2024. It would merely force the Church to reckon with its classification of the roles women were allowed to play (i.e. nuns).
Regardless of how messily it might serve the narrative, certainly, the "discovery of the truth" moment and the consequent dissembling of that once again would be the most powerful connection between the two narratives--Joan's 1st-person narrative, and the third person narrative of the later era, when she is unknown by history but might have been, absent the type of "hiding away" of texts at Lorsch that do not serve the Christian narrative according to the four basic Gospels. History is messy and written by the victors to serve their own ends and mirror their belief systems of right and wrong. This is a theme of The Latecoming West, but it has yet to be fully developed.
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Or perhaps I am totally off and it is more about the relationship between Judaism and Christianity going back towards the founding of the Church:
"I already harboured antipathy towards Catholicism from the Church Fathers' writing condemning both women and Jews, but after the Gnostics and Valentinus most of all, my view of the Church was, if anything, softened. Marcion and the Valentinians were worse in their invalidation of the Jewish people and their religion. Valentinus may not have gone quite so far as Montanus, who proclaimed himself the Paraclete, but the different was meaningless, for Valentinus had rendered an unknowable scripture. This was the antithesis of the Word embodied in the spirit and words of Christ." (43)
Earlier, this almost posits Constantine the Great and Tertullian as precursors to Hitler for their "unflinching contempt" towards the Jewish people, but I feel I am oversimplifying, and that is something The Latecoming West does not do. Perhaps the first half is even "headier" than Vol I. and I simply missed it, skimming over some of these deeper contemplations to get towards the "action," which for me at least came in the 1930's narrative, and perhaps only because it felt more relatable to our present day-and-age. For one example, I skirted over the fact that Clovis is not just a "male saviour" that serves as Joan's vehicle towards new settings, but an intellectual influence as well that tempers her adherence to traditional Christian beliefs and expands her worldview:
"Clovis, who in his twenties had spent several years in Athens and was a fluent reader and speaker of Greek, had introduced me to the ideas of Plutarch, who came after Plato, teaching that God, the Creator of the world, had transformed matter as the vessel for evil into a divine World-Soul, which was however, the source of all evil. Plutarch's cosmos thus exists both as good and evil, in what was called the Dyad.
'You might think Plutarch's World-Soul inspired the malevolent demiurge of Valentinus,' Clovis had cautioned me. 'But Plutarch, just like Plato has a virtuous World-Soul and its dark side co-governing the universe in concert. Both Plato's and Plutarch's visions are distinct entire from the Gnostic view of a faulty creator fashioning the world as the inherent source of all evil.'" (21)
What follows is an excerpt from Plato's Timaeus (which I had not even heard of before, and which harkens back to Volume I's brilliant Phaedo-redux) interpolated by 2 pages (as in Volume I) that are not words but two abstract color images which may illustrate the creation of the universe or something else entirely. I simply do not know, and I do not think Andes wants us to know, yet (there is another similar page towards the end of the text which feels less abstract). And I am not sure what Volumes III and IV will hold, but I would guess they will have some kind of "WTF" element that accentuates the narrative, and I would hope that the story of Rahel and Patek will be continued. The novel ends on a note not entirely dissimilar to the opening pages of Volume I, where we see Joan in a new setting after attaining a higher-rank, four years later--but in the former case it serves as a "teaser" for her destiny, and in this case, a natural progression and demonstration of revolutionary thought, and recognition. It hints that Volume III will depict Joan's final years before ascending the papacy, and Volume IV will finally deliver on what exactly happened during her reign as Pope.
Whatever the case, I look forward to them. These are not perfect books, but they seem to be about something very important that goes to the heart of our belief systems and concepts of faith. They are noble attempts at discovering the truth of the nature of our existence, and how we may best love and support others around us (especially those that are irrationally and inhumanely condemned). This is at the very foundation of what it means to be human, and the same intellectual discourse that the Greeks undertook 2400 years ago, when they had very little recorded history on which to reflect. We now have the benefit of witnessing the progress of technology--as well as the turmoil, bloodshed, intolerance and ignorance that have persisted through the present age. We may know more about the nature of the universe, and have gone to the Moon, and have created little computers to keep on our persons at all times, and imaginary robots that sweep up all of human knowledge into a tidy few sentences to determine the truth (or current understanding) about any given subject, but we still fall prey to the baser human instincts of jealousy, envy, competition, dominance, and the dangerous pride that sometimes accompanies ambition. As such, it is fair to look to the Greeks as having just as advanced an understanding of the human heart and mind as we do today--and this is just one among several precepts that The Latecoming West seems to suggest. History is all around us, and we will only advance as a civilization if we are able to peer a little closer and understand what got us here.
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