A Message From The Past - by Sue Purkiss

I recently visited Canterbury for the first time. The cathedral is a beautiful building, though my favourite is still Wells, which is my 'local'. Wells certainly has the most stunning chapter house: I really think it must be one of the loveliest rooms in the world.

Geoffrey Chaucer - a kindly face from Canterbury.

What Canterbury does have, though, is an incredibly powerful story - which is soaked into its very stones. It's the story of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 to 1170: specifically, it's the story of his murder.

Becket came from a moderately well-to-do Norman family. As he was beginning to make his way in the world, his father suffered some kind of financial setback, and Thomas had to take a position as a clerk to pay his way. However, he did well: working to start off with for a relative, but later moving to the household of Theobald of Bec, the Archbishop of Canterbury - then, as now, the archbishopric of Canterbury was the foremost one in the English church. Becket did well, and was entrusted with several missions to Rome as well as being sent to France to study canon law. In 1154 he became Archdeacon of Canterbury and was also given various other posts in the church.

In fact, he did so well that Theobald recommended him to the King, Henry 11 for the post of Lord Chancellor - a position of considerable power and renown. Henry was engaged in a struggle with the church, because he felt it had too much power: for instance, a priest could only be tried in a church court, no matter what his alleged crime was. He believed that Becket was on his side - that he was ideally placed, with one foot in the church camp and one in the secular camp, to help him to shift the balance of power in favour of the crown.

At first, all went as planned. Becket helped Henry to extract money both from the church and from secular landowners; the two men got on well, with Henry even sending his son to live in Becket's household.

Then Theobald died, and Henry had a brilliant idea: he would make his friend archbishop, and then power over the church - with all its possessions and riches - and state would reside firmly in Henry's hands.

But it didn't work out like that. Thomas took his new position and responsibilities extremely seriously. He saw it as his duty, not to do what Henry wanted, but to defend the church - if necessary, to the death. Henry was astonished. How dare this man defy him? Wounded and furious at this perceived betrayal (is this reminding you of anyone?), he exiled him. The Pope eventually brokered a kind of peace, and Becket returned: but still he defied the King. Eventually, in what might possibly be called a tantrum, Henry turned on his courtiers and demanded to know why none of them would sort Becket out for him. (The exact words are not known, but he is commonly said to have railed at them: 'Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?') And four knights took him at his word.

This is where Thomas was killed. The two swords, and their shadows, represent the four knights who killed him.

They went to Canterbury, and inside the church, in a small space where one staircase led to the crypt, another up to the altar, and a door led to the cloisters, they brutally attacked him. As he died, his blood soaked into the stones.

Who knows if this was really what Henry meant to happen? Afterwards, he came to the cathedral and did humble and apparently sincere penance. But the four knights, though they eventually had to go into exile, were not arrested and their lands were not confiscated.

Very quickly, Becket's tomb inside the cathedral became a place of sanctity and pilgrimage - a place to come and be healed. Becket was soon declared a saint. Fifty years later, his remains were moved upstairs to the new eastern part of the cathedral, beyond the altar, into a tomb richly decorated with gold and jewels. In the sixteenth century, Erasmus, the famous Dutch humanist, priest and theologian, saw the tomb and was astonished by it; he said that the gold was the least of its riches, compared to the wealth of huge jewels which had been given by kings and nobles in homage to the martyr.

A few years later, Henry VIII ransacked the tomb and stole the gold and the jewels. But it wasn't just about the money. It was about the story. He had to do everything he could to obliterate the cult of Thomas Becket; because, even more so than Henry II, he couldn't bear the thought that a commoner should defy the king; that a man's conscience should be more important to him than his allegiance to the crown. But it didn't work. Thomas, and what he stood far - a determination to act according to his conscience - was not forgotten, despite the best efforts first of one king, then of another, far more brutal one.

I'm not a believer, but I think that's quite an encouraging message from the stones of Canterbury Cathedral. Especially at the moment. Those who are close to political leaders, take note: your allegiance to what is right takes precedence over your allegiance to your boss. That's the message that resounds down the centuries from Thomas Becket.

RIDDLEY WALKER by Russell Hoban .... by Adèle Geras

Followers of this blog will know how fond I am of cathedrals. I've written about them often enough, but this post is about something else. It was sparked, however, by a visit to Canterbury Cathedral. This was my first visit. Below is a photo showing towers against the kind of sky that goes with towers very well: full of slightly forbidding clouds. No one who's been here, or who saw the television programme about life in the Cathedral, can be in any doubt about its beauty and majesty and importance as the diocesan church of the Archbishop of Canterbury.  The memorial to Thomas à Becket is here, too.

But what the Cathedral brought to my mind more than anything was a book I read when it first came out in 1980.  Thinking about it since my visit, it occurred to me that the afterlife of books was  a strange thing. When I look back on  my reading youth, there are many writers whose work I used to love and who have almost disappeared from the literary landscape, swept away by a rising tide of the new, the whizzy, the fashionable, the prizewinning and so on. I'm thinking of writers like Charles Morgan, Pamela Hansford Johnson, C.P. Snow, Mazo de la Roche, Elizabeth Goudge , and others. Publishers like Persephone Books have rescued and given a new life to writers we might easily have forgotten, like Dorothy Whipple, who 's a particular favourite of mine, and Elizabeth Jenkins and Molly Panter-Downes and we must all be very grateful to them, because many writers  are unread  when their time in the limelight is past.

Russell Hoban is not one of these. He's remembered in certain quarters. His children's books, many illustrated by Quentin Blake, are loved by many. He wrote a book called THE MOUSE AND HIS CHILD which I think is a classic, though I'm not sure how many people these days know it or read it. And his adult books seem not to be at the top of anyone's agenda any longer. If you said his name at a dinner party, how many of the guests would have heard of him? I am not at all sure.

Because all of us who write on this blog are novelists, I think it's salutary to remind ourselves that our books will soon 'be one with Nineveh and Tyre'. It's a sobering thought, and I don't want to depress either myself or my fellow History Girls, but I do feel that  most of what most of us write will be forgotten.

Still, there is the upside. Some of what we've written may float to the surface, so to speak, in the distant future. Some History Girls in the 23rd century may come across our books and bring them back to a kind of life. It's in this spirit that I am doing my bit to preserve this wonderful novel. I would like it to be remembered.

Bloomsbury are to be congratulated on keeping in print one of Hoban's most interesting books: RIDDLEY WALKER. This edition, from 2012, has a good introduction by Will Self and glancing through the many enthusiastic reviews on Amazon, I can see that it's mainly the science fiction fans and fantasy buffs who love it. I read it, as I say, long ago and in 1986, I saw a production of it at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre with David Threlfall as Riddley which was completely brilliant. It seemed then  to be the kind of book which could never be adapted, but I suspect that nowadays, people are more likely to have seen RIDDLEY WALKER as a play. 

Back to Canterbury Cathedral. It was when I saw this painting of St Eustace (whose legend is a very strange tale indeed) that I was reminded of Hoban's amazing novel.

 This is  a detail of the painting above. I thought at once of RIDDLEY WALKER because the novel is deeply connected with the story of St Eustace.

 Here is a page from the book, taken at random. When I saw this weird hybrid language, my heart sank. I'd  known Hoban as the author of such novels as TURTLE DIARY and  KLEINZEIT. The latter was odd but marvellous and though it was surreal,  I managed to read it with no difficulty and loved it. It was written in English, which was a great plus as far as I was concerned. 

I must admit straight away that I am not a fantasy or science fiction fan. I do not like books about what happens after nuclear apocalypses. In general, I don't like books I have to decipher.  I opened RIDDLEY WALKER and almost closed it straight away. But I persisted because I was a Hoban fan and I felt that there must be something there. Plus, of course, it was being reviewed and fêted all over the place, back in the day and when I was young, I liked being up to speed with what was new.  I'm much less of a follower of fashion now that I'm older. So I deciphered the first page. Then I deciphered the second and on and on I went, drawn into Riddley's strange language, and his even stranger world. After a few pages, I was reading Riddley's tale with ease.

How to describe this book? How to persuade new readers to try it? It's a bit like THE ROAD, by Cormac McCarthy in that it's post -Apocalyptic. It's set in a world which is very different from ours but in which certain things from our world (Punch and Judy shows, most importantly) have acquired a significance we never gave them. It's set in what is recognisably Kent (there's even a map in the front of the novel) and the Cathedral and St Eustace and his legend are  of great importance. It's a book that's very hard to describe and it's not one that everyone will like, but it's full of humour and some of the sayings like "TRUBBA NOT" (don't worry) have become part of my personal vocabulary. I also like PRIME MINCER for Prime Minister. It's a book which a certain kind of teenager would adore, and did adore when it first appeared. I've written this post in order to draw some attention to it so that hopefully a whole new audience can share Riddley's adventures. And if anyone else out there is a fan, I'd be very happy to read your opinion of this dazzling novel in the comments.