HISTORICAL FICTION
Rapture
Emily Maguire
Allen & Unwin ($34.99)

You should always judge a book by its cover; and look, just look at the cover of Emily Maguire’s new novel. The gilded letters of the title Rapture are pricked from a seduction of flowers, oranges, lemons; warbling birds (if you concentrate you’ll hear them) and some daintily vigorous blossoms. And there, perfectly, alarmingly centred is an eye. It’s encircled by gold filigree and it is looking directly at you, drawing you into this long-ago tale.

The eye belongs to Agnes, the daughter of a former cleric known in their city, Mainz, as the English Priest. This is the ninth century and the English Priest had landed in the Frankish countries “finding souls for God and King Charles, saving generations of Saxon babes from lives spent worshipping rocks and afterlives of eternal torment”.

His daughter is the result (probably) of his casual rape of the most beautiful girl in the village, whom he hastily married. The beautiful girl dies in childbirth but the infant lives, blessed with her father’s intellect - and his looks. From her mother she inherited something unshakably Pagan.

Maguire sweeps us into the old legend that there was once a girl of astonishing learning who, for a few years in the ninth century, became Pope of the Holy Roman Empire. In Maguire’s telling, she is called Pope John the English. It is all conjecture and gossip, as legend should be, and serious scholars turn up their noses, but Maguire’s bravura skills energise this dusty tale. Is there nothing on earth she does not find interesting enough to polish into life?

Agnes is inconsequential. She is a girl, and valueless because she is no beauty, so she hangs about at the table of the fine house her father maintains (by mysterious means) in the town. Mainz is large and important and attracts learned men from all over the Christian world and Agnes absorbs their talk, every word, picking up languages, re-thinking discussions. She also reads and writes. Her father accepts her brilliance, and although he treats her with brutality, he can’t help talking with her, teaching such a mind. Soon she outstrips him in learning but understands very well that she must keep this to herself, just as she keeps close her other observations of the external world, things she cannot explain or argue through.

She realises that “men say one thing with their mouths while their bodies said another thing altogether.” At 12, she is destined for marriage, but she knows she will never marry, believing that God will set her on the path He has chosen for her, not one of a maid and wife, nor a servile nun, but something unknown. She has also seen what childbirth does to women. At the centre of her life is her radiant certainty of God.

And then she is 16, managing her father’s household, now often bored by the men’s talk. And Brother Randulf, with russet curls and a bearing belonging to an adventurer but not a priest, walks through the door. Agnes cannot speak. Or stand. Her rapture is sexual but, for all her brilliance, all her intense education, she is as innocent as the morning; she has no knowledge or understanding of what is happening to her.