I’ve been sitting in a cancer ward at the Royal Marsden Hospital, desperately relying on a Tudor detective novel to distract me. Nurses are putting cancer drugs into my child and it’s almost impossible to bear.
One of them catches me glaring at her. “Everything OK?” she asks.
“I don’t want you to put those drugs into him,” I say.
“I do want you to. But I don’t.”
There are a lot of very sick youngsters here, moon-faced and hairless; I can hear a background chorus of children crying inconsolably and the occasional sharp scream. My own child is tied up to a chemo machine with its implacable clickety-clack, clickety-clack; he used to be a fan of Thomas the Tank Engine programmes, whose “clickety-clack, clickety-clack, down the track” became a meme.
The Sylvia Plath metaphor “I’ve…boarded the train there’s no getting off” haunted me throughout the time I was pregnant with him, and chemo is like that. You sign up for it, you put up with it, all the way to the terminal.
The infernal bedside waiting is like being trapped in a timepiece. A vast hospital system grinds slowly around the patient; it knows its own ways.
Writer C J Sansom was diagnosed with cancer just before embarking on his latest novel Tombland. “Tombland” completes a series of seven Tudor mystery novels based around a hunchbacked lawyer, Matthew Shardlake; it took Sansom twice as long as the others to write and, in his darkest moments, he feared he might not finish it before the cancer took him.
Can Sansom’s hero Matthew Shardlake rise to the distraction challenge for me? I need a book to wrench me away from bedside terror and panic. Yes, this solid series cuts the mustard. The books are remarkably detailed accounts of Tudor times, told from the perspective of a man with a serious disability. Life is far from fair in Shardlake’s world, and he is very much an outcast.
The seven doorstop tomes are airport novels - an easy read. Nonetheless they are also a reliable briefing on how the great, lumbering Tudor state turned itself away from Catholicism and towards Protestantism in the early modern period.
For people researching Huguenot ancestry, they give an insight into how England came to be a place where Protestant refugees from France could be accepted - as sturdy allies in the ferocious battle against papistry.
I find the detective thrust of the books compelling when I’m most in need of a page-turner. At the same time, I love the intricate religious debates which are touched on: individual characters have their own religious sensibilities and faith is – for once – portrayed as something people get really worked up about.
If you struggle to understand the Catholicism versus Protestantism debate – for example, why stained glass windows in churches were smashed by reformers – the Shardlake novels offer an explanation. Most of Sansom’s characters have heartfelt religious beliefs and express them fervently. Monks, for example, put the Catholic case. Minor characters who are essentially heretics heading for the stake put the opposite case. It’s easy to see their respective points of view because they are convincing characters.
At any rate, I have found these books helpful. I itch with frustration when I see fictional representations of religious zealots which lack conviction. Most TV and film dramas set in Tudor times – and there are many – are guilty of this; Versailles is just one example. Human beings don’t go to the stake for nothing; we want to live.
Having been forged by zealotry myself, I understand the fire that drives it. It’s not a thing to be trifled with.
Tombland by CJ Sansom The Colossus, by Sylvia Plath
Hi Jo, I agree with all the other comments.
Your blog is a roller-coaster of emotions. From the gut-wrenching situation you find yourself in you manage not only to bring in some darkish humour (Thomas the Tank Engine made me smile), juxtaposed against Plath’s desperate words, but also to lead us to an analysis of the beginnings of the Huguenot migration from France.
Returning to your hospital experience you then present an analytical truth of the workings of a system: ‘The infernal bedside waiting is like being trapped in a timepiece. A vast hospital system grinds slowly around the patient; it knows its own ways’; a phrase which jolted me into understanding religious zealotry in your discussion of Sansom’s work. The novel is a pleasant diversion for you and for the reader, realising that underneath it all is the religious questioning which, I see, characterises your blogs.
I get a feeling by the end that your personal zealotry was of a younger Jo and that family commitments (and other events possibly) have allowed this to slide away. By the end of the blog you wonderfully bring together the cancer ward and religious points of view to a fundamental celebration of life and hope – ‘we want to live’.
Thank you Jo.
Carrie x
Your comment is so perceptive, Carrie. In his books, Sansom brings out very poignantly that, as humans, our drive to live is strong; but not irresistible. I am interested in that, and martyrdom is a recurring theme of the blog.
As usual, Jo, you have a way of reaching the parts with your words that a lot of what I read just doesn’t touch! (I don’t mean to be disrespectful by referring to a well known beer ad.)
It’s the bits about the cancer ward that hit me hard. I’m a hospitalphobe, even though both my parents were medics and I was brought up right next to hospitals. Sick adults are bad enough but when it’s your child it really is heart-rendingly awful and you do convey that feeling so well, so succinctly and without sentimentality.
I’ve never read the Sansom books but they sound fascinating. It’s hard to write about belief in another era with conviction. I’m reading a book about the siege of Masada in 71BCE and I’m not sure that the author, Alice Hoffmann, manages to do it with complete success. To me she makes it sound at times like the Zealots were hysterical, superstitious and melodramatic. So when I’m next in the library, I’ll be looking out for a Sansom.
I should have added I like the use of photos too. The empty hospital bed- a positive or a negative implication…. and smashing the religious iconography….as we have seen so recently in the Middle East.
Jo –
I am stunned by your tight prose and light touch which once again brings so much together in one post. It is tremendously generous of you to have shared your experience of the unspeakable agony of the cancer ward. Your stylish link to Sansom, Tudor England and the Hugenots, makes me want to rush out and buy the Sansom novels immediately.
And re Religious zealots who lack conviction…I agree. It leaves the viewer puzzled. I have often felt the same about fictional labour movement struggles where the penalty, if not death was certainly transportation. Somehow they rarely manage to catch the fire, let alone getting the film extras to demonstrate their rage convincingly.
I love the way you move from a personal topic (and one horribly close to you in the last months) that seems to have nothing to do with Huguenots, and then bring it round to that.
I did not know Sansom has cancer. Tombland is so long, I was not surprised that it took him a while! When feeling poorly myself I recently reread the whole series, and am now rereading a biography of Bess of Hardwick, which makes me even more aware how skilfully Sansom blends Tudor history with gripping fiction. The Hardwick writer, Mary Lovell, cheats a bit by using the word Protestant, even though she knows that it wasn’t yet in general use.
I heard Sansom give an interview on Radio 4 which was extremely moving. I’m very grateful to him for giving me books to read which are a quick exit route from what is impossible to bear. Through reading, my mind absorbs all the alarming new information and – after a period of sheer terror – eventually settles down.
Thank you for this most moving and brave blogpost, Jo. As always, you have the knack of weaving your personal experience with history, your heritage and your wider interests into a seamless whole.
Thank you, Hephzi. I suppose that weaving is partly a quest to make sense of the world as I know it.
A powerful blog Jo, and it’s very good to see you back online. I really must have a go at the Sansom books, having heard good reports from several sources.
If you’ve been to Norwich you’ll know that the area round the cathedral is called Tombland – not as I thought because of the graveyard but from the Anglo-Saxon meaning ‘empty space’.
I didn’t know that, Ted – I haven’t yet reached “Tombland” in the series. It’s the sort of detail Sansom might include. I’m fascinated by the way he manages to make his novels bestselling blockbusters which are also historically satisfying.