As usual, we start with how we came upon the book. In this case, I met the author through work. He had made vague references to his book(s) in conversation, and later sent a couple e-mails about how it was available, in what format, etc. I knew he happened to live along the same route I would be taking to visit my parents, so I stopped by his house one chilly Sunday afternoon a couple months ago, and requested a signed copy.
(I included some other pictures because I thought more of those two magnificent Basilicas should be seen for context.)
I had known enough about it back in July of 2021, shortly before I went to Italy--enough to ask if he wanted me to do any particular research, if I got the chance, going to the Vatican and everything. He said no, but I looked for remnants of Pope Joan (referred to as Pope Johannes, I'd imagine), and I do not recall any. I regret that I did not read this book before that, because I would have had a better idea of where I was looking (at least which century).
So the subject of the book is a female pope that was effectively erased from history. Just here, looking up Pope Joan on Wikipedia, I am amazed to see that a bust of her (among all of the other pontiffs) had been featured in the Siena Cathedral, but was removed in 1600 after protest. I remember seeing all of those busts when I visited the Siena Cathedral and specifically looking for Pope Joan (or Ioannes), so I had some presence of mind at the time. There was another list of all of the Popes at the Vatican, which she was not on. Perhaps I will attempt to post photos of these.
Actually, from the Wikipedia page, it seems there is a fair amount of recognition of Pope Joan as a figure, whether real or fictional. There have been a number of books either about her, or referencing her, even a couple of films and a video game--but I had never heard of her. I normally do not read historical fiction so I went into it with a certain hesitation.
After finishing it, I can say that it is a very good debut novel that will shock the reader in several different ways. Its chief virtue is in its retelling of the history of early Christian theology through the narration of Joan, who is particularly scholarly and knowledgeable of the available literature at the time. It is casually profound, and feels deeply and richly researched. And then it shifts to being something else entirely.
Some of these decisions, in my very humble opinion, are questionable. Sometimes when reviewing books, I am wary of spoilers, and spoilers need to be discussed to enrich the substance of the review, to inform the overall digestion of such. I generally do this with specially denoted asterisks. However, when the first such instance of this experimental element emerges on the second page, it feels pointless to bifurcate.
***
Pope Joan is born somewhere in the early-to-mid 800's, to a drunk brute of a father and a broken mother bent on instilling perfection in their daughter. The novel has a touching (but also gruesome) moment towards its end, where Joan reflects upon an incident that she apparently buried in her subconscious, which shifts her perspective on her mother, to a degree. But early on, Joan is a model student and has a couple run-ins and "puppy love"-type experiences with boys. Notably, Joan interacts with barely any women in this novel at all, save her mother and a lady renting a room. Then, before anything of real import happens in the novel, apart from these picaresque episodes of "normal life," there is a Viking raid on their town and many of the men and women are killed and/or raped. Joan's father is killed, but this seems to traumatize her less than the death of her friend Gawin's father--who is murdered right in front of him, which she also observes.
This is a bombastic confusing scene that seems to come out of nowhere. As it is the event that sets the story in motion, I would have liked to see a little bit more background on the Vikings and how they came upon Mainz and their general modus operandi. But we learn about as much about the Vikings as we knew before, which is that they pillage and conquer.
Joan tries to live with her mother, for a couple of years, I think, but when she is 16, she runs away from home, and then the novel (or at least the "hero[ine]'s quest" portion of it) truly advances forward.
***
This happens around page 66 of the novel, however, and by this point the reader has been exposed to two elements which completely have nothing to do with this novel at all. Certainly, one of them may connect a narrative throughline, but I have a hard time imagining what the second is meant to do. I will not spoil it outright, but they jump ahead about 1100 years in time. One of them is an impassioned essay rhapsodizing over (and perhaps overselling) a legendary English post-punk band; the other is a scene taken straight out of Stand by Me (e.g. it involves an eating contest and projectile vomiting).
I found these things engaging, but this is only because I know the author, and because I too, can appreciate this act of "tricking" the reader--like, "Oh, you thought the book was going to be about this? Well, you're wrong!" But no. The book is really mostly about Pope Joan.
Just her early life, though. The first page of the novel describes a day later in her life--when she is serving as the Pope--and we never get back to that point. Perhaps this will come in a later volume, though I am unclear if the subsequent iterations of The Latecoming West also serve as a chronological narrative of her life, amongst the other stories I understand them to tell (about the Holocaust, for one).
***
But after Joan leaves Mainz, she sets a plan for survival, and this is the first moment where the novel begins to shine, for it is rather exceptional and extraordinary in its setting and competing concerns. From another angle, this is a novel about finding oneself, trying to set a course for one's life, settling on an occupation, and pursuing passion. This is a treacherous setting for Joan, but a rather simple one for the reader: she does not have many options available to her. In the 800's, it was not nearly as difficult to settle on an occupation, but the options available to women were extremely limited. Joan rather quickly determines that her best chance of survival is to disguise herself as a teenage boy and study at a Benedictine Monastery, for they will provide shelter and food. The monks are also the recorders of history and literature at the time, and given Joan's passions, the monastery is clearly the perfect place for her. So she attempts to head in the direction of one and has a rather amusing episode with a rather unpleasant lady renting a room. Then the next day she has a chance encounter with the other major character in the novel.
This is Clovis, whom I imagine as a rather hulking man, and who takes Joan under his wing and provides a lay of the land and sets her on a course to Lorsch Abbey. She rather quickly falls in love with him and I question how much detail to provide on their relationship, or the plot going forward.
Suffice to say, she does eventually settle in at Lorsch Abbey, and this is another strong part of the novel--the description of all of the daily activities. The novel also shifts into a different mode here, and becomes more of a theological treatise than human interest story. And as noted above, for me personally, this is the great value the novel confers.
***
In a sense, this reminded me of Leave Society, with its themes of erasure from history and lost and discredited texts, leaders, worshipped beings, and the manipulations ever-present in a "dominator" society. The dichotomy of the church--as a spiritual ideal and as a corrupt institution determinative of political power--is frequently discussed, along with its desultory attitude towards women. Many excerpts of such sections could be taken, and it is hard to choose a representative one, but as for one:
"The Historia Ecclesiastica's standing as one of the seminal works of Christian scholarship is due in no small part to Eusebius's quotations--often at great length--of his sources, thus constituting in many instances the sole extant record of a host of crucial original voices in Christianity. So, for example, the Greek's lengthy citations from a now-lost treatise of an anonymous writer, most likely a Phrygian bishop at the time of its writing, provides the sole surviving connexion to the origins of the ascetic and apocalyptic movement of prophecy in the second century, called the New Prophecy by its followers and known today as Montanism.
Introducing the sect as the 'so-called Phrygian heresy,' the name it was known by in his time, Eusebius quotes at length from the anonymous writer's work, which recounts the origins of Montanism. The bishop had visited the Galatian Church in Ancyra, a Phrygian village, and found it in thrall to this false prophecy, where a 'recent convert' named Montanus with an insatiable desire for leadership became frenzied and ecstatic, babbling in cant and prophesying of miracles to come.
Among others, two women, named Priscilla and Maximilla, were brought to possession by this vision, and they spoke and behaved as incoherently as he had. Before long all his followers were banished from the Church and denied communion.
Montanism questioned the moral authority of the Church hierarchy and of bishops impure in spirit to lead the masses to God, emphasising instead the people's communion with the Holy Spirit. I confess these words thrilled my soul, for they spoke directly to qualities I had long felt lacking in Church leaders. Priscilla and Maximilla, Montanus's acolytes, left their husbands and families to follow him, lending a more 'demonic' aspect to the New Prophecy by way of the sweeping powers they shared with their founder in the movement--roles the leaders of the Christian Church found blasphemous.
The fact two women assumed such key roles within this movement and drew the ire of the Church elevated my excitement even more. Alas, my hopes were dashed not long after, for I learnt Montanus conveniently identified himself as the Paraclete prophesied in John 14:26 through which the Holy Spirit would convey Christ's kingdom, Heavenly Jerusalem, in the Phrygian town of Pepuza, the site for his church,.
Epiphanius, to whom I was led after Eusebius, in his Panarion or 'medicine chest' of remedies to counteract the ills of heresy, cites Montanus's own words:
I am the Lord God omnipotent, who have descended into
Man. [...] neither an angel, nor an ambassador, but I, the Lord,
I am the Lord God omnipotent, who have descended into
Man. [...] neither an angel, nor an ambassador, but I, the Lord,
the Father, am come." (171-173)
Or another, shortly thereafter:
"Of the dozens of gospels in currency prior to Constantine, only four were adopted into the Biblical canon. At some point the question must arise: when is the 'heretical' passage heretical, and when does it merely transmit the vagaries of human perception that lend credibility and authenticity to a collective experience? For the exclusion of the latter debases it in the realm of consensus and uniformity for the sheer sake of convenience and control.
When I dwelt upon it, I realised further that Acts of John could not but be deemed heretical. A God who invites us to dance, as Christ does earlier in Acts, a God in need of our love and devotion to Him in order to achieve His true divinity--and ours--what kind of God would that be? No more than His Son would be by the loins of Man. I was discovering there were irreconcilable hypocrisies in ecclesiastical doctrine which had nothing to do with content or value and everything to do with preserving power." (176)
Sections such as these serve to further educate the reader on such arcane items, knowledge that they might never come across despite the omnipresence of Christianity in our world today, due perhaps to the machinations of the Church, banning censored texts that seem to allow for divergent interpretations. Regardless, quotations are often exhumed from the Bible in support of various propositions that do not exist in harmony with the teachings of Christ. It happens anyways, but if we knew more about texts such as the Acts of John, we would at least have a wider prism through which to investigate Christianity. Because John the Angelic refers to some of the substance of such texts, we are all the richer for its existence. Surely, all of this information must be kept somewhere, but that would generally be within the ambit of scholars and theologians, not lay readers.
***
Further word need be said about the experimental elements of this novel before this review is concluded. The first is the interpolation of the music-journalism text. While I did not understand the connection between the narratives, it would have been less jarring without the interpolation, and felt that it might have worked better as a separate chapter. Perhaps a series of essays, because this mostly seems to be one, about one song. As it stands, it gives the reader the feeling of channel-switching between VH-1 and the History Channel. So, we might refer to this as the "VH-1 element."
There is also the "Stand by Me-episode," which does not interpolate text, nor separate as a chapter, and I have a harder time understanding where this lends depth or substance to the work. I can understand how the VH-1 element could work--for it seems to posit the cultural figure in question as a kind of spiritual descendent of Pope Joan--but while the Stand by Me-episode was probably the most amusing part of the book, I did not sense its connection to the larger narrative. Perhaps it is metaphorical--the foolish and unhealthy ways people compete with one another to win questionable acclaim--but I did not "see Joan" in any of the contestants in the episode. Perhaps it demands a closer reading but to be perfectly honest, it is not an analysis I want to undertake at this time.
***
Then, there is the experiment that works: the Socrates chapter. This comes towards the end of the novel, and I would say from this point forward, it is at its strongest, though it ends at an anticlimax. But the Socrates chapter is completely separate, and serves as a coda to Plato's Phaedo. The Phaedo may be one of the most profound works in the history of Western Literature and so composing a kind of addendum to it is a dangerous and ambitious task. It is to the author's credit that it comes off. It bears a certain resemblance to the "Penelope" section of Ulysses (i.e. Molly Bloom's 80-page stream-of-consciousness fever dream, shorn of punctuation or any spacing of text), but thankfully there are actual sentences, and it probably works just as well as that section of that novel, because it feels like an accurate representation of the inner working of Socrates's mind after drinking the hemlock. In particular, there is a vision of Theseus and his ship. Now I had heard vague rumblings about Theseus's ship, as an intellectual-philosophical exercise (even Elon Musk tweeted a reference to it recently), but the way it is presented here feels surreal and otherworldly, profound; it is arguably the most powerful moment in the novel. To give some sense of it:
"The death of his father transformed Theseus from a hero-prince into a founder-king. Something spirited the ancient light away, and Socrates was returned to his cell, dizzy from the enormity and detail of the vision that had just been pushed through his mind and his senses. How could he know these things? And were they all true? The vivid succession of dreams that had throttled Theseus's heart where he lay in grief over the death of his father was as real as any actual event Socrates had experienced himself. Had the hemlock caused this, or something greater working in and through him in these closing moments of his life? And why Theseus? Perhaps to remind him of the nexus between the history of this ship to Delos and his own fate, a confluence of ceremony and destiny to afford him insight into the nature of both? And what of that tempest off the coast of Cyprus, if not the will of the gods and the destiny of Athens in inheriting a new leader? Do we see what we see because they are revealed to us, or are they revealed to us because we see them? Which is the mover and which the thing moved? At the brink of death, in this final embrace of the living with its own flawed boundary, the philosopher thought at last to himself: How much I will miss this. For the world of the question not only embodied desire, it constituted the very body desired itself. The philosopher's being dwelt not in the answer but in the voluptuous contours of the question." (146-147)
This is not a perfect novel, but as noted previously, in this review and others, a perfect literary debut is extraordinary, especially a self-published one. While I disagree with a few of the choices, the author accomplished a great deal with this text, and at the very least it piqued my interest to see what comes next in The Latecoming West. Ultimately, it stands for the proposition that history is a cycle, and that a great many questions we have about living and how to do it best have already been asked and answered for centuries. Too many of these lessons from history continue to be lost, and it is to the credit of books like this that they are brought into the light.
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