Tag: WalterScottPrize

Book Review – For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie

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About the Book

In the year of 1413, two women meet for the first time in the city of Norwich.

Margery has left her fourteen children and husband behind to make her journey. Her visions of Christ – which have long alienated her from her family and neighbours, and incurred her husband’s abuse – have placed her in danger with the men of the Church, who have begun to hound her as a heretic.

Julian, an anchoress, has not left Norwich, nor the cell to which she has been confined, for twenty-­three years. She has told no one of her own visions – and knows that time is running out for her to do so.

The two women have stories to tell one another. Stories about girlhood, motherhood, sickness, loss, doubt and belief; revelations more powerful than the world is ready to hear. Their meeting will change everything.

Format: ebook (167 pages) Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication date: 19th January 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2024.

The book tells the story of two 15th century female mystics – Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe – alternating frequently between the perspectives of the two women. Both names were vaguely familiar to me but I knew pretty much nothing about their lives or their writings. I’m not sure if that was a help or a hindrance. On the one hand it meant I came to the book with no preconceptions but, on the other hand, it made it difficult for me to assess how much of the story was the product of the author’s imagination. Not having much interest in religious doctrine or a belief in visions, I appreciated the book more for the insight it gave into the lives of medieval women than anything else.

I found myself particuarly drawn to Julian’s story. I felt the author really managed to convey in a believable way Julian’s profound religious conviction and suggest credible reasons for her decision to seek a contemplative life. The detail about the life of an anchoress and the process of becoming one was absolutely fascinating and I liked the way the author brought out Julian’s feelings of isolation and her struggles with the daily realities of confinement. ‘I could take ten paces in one direction, turn and take six paces, turn and take eight paces, turn and take six paces. Ten. Six. Eight. Six. Ten. Six. Eight. Six. Ten. Six. Eight. Six.’

Who can say whether Margery’s visions were real – she obviously believed them to be – or the result of some sort of mental disorder, possibly post-natal depression. I found the rigour of her self-imposed regime disturbing. However, the fact she continued to share her visions in the face of suspicion, anger and ridicule, as well as accusations of heresy, speaks to the strength of her conviction. The Margery of the book is a woman of passion in all senses of the word, someone prepared to defy the constraints imposed on her on account of her sex. Apart from anything else, the fact she gave birth to fourteen children suggests remarkable resilience.

The meeting between the two women mentioned in the first sentence of the blurb only features at the very end of the book and is rather fleeting. This made the book feel slightly unbalanced. It also didn’t seem that consequential, just a sharing of their similar experiences.

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain is a fascinating book and taught me a lot of things I didn’t know such as the fact that The Book of Margery Kempe is the first autobiography written in English by a man or woman and Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich is the earliest surviving book in English written by a woman. Its simple prose made it very readable but it didn’t completely enthrall me.

In three words: Intimate, introspective, meditative
Try something similar: The Book of Days by Francesca Kay

About the Author

Victoria MacKenzie is a fiction writer and poet. She has won a number of writing prizes, including a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award, and has been awarded writing residencies in Scotland, Finland and Australia. For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain won the Saltire First Book Award and was a Book of the Year in the Guardian, Sunday Times, Scotsman and Irish Times. (Photo: Author website)

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Book Review – Tombland by C. J. Sansom

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About the Book

Spring, 1549. Two years after the death of Henry VIII, England is sliding into chaos.

The nominal king, Edward VI, is 11 years old. His uncle, Edward Seymour, Lord Hertford, rules as Edward’s regent and Protector. In the kingdom, radical Protestants are driving the old religion into extinction, while the Protector’s prolonged war with Scotland has led to hyperinflation and economic collapse. Rebellion is stirring among the peasantry.

Matthew Shardlake has been working as a lawyer in the service of Henry’s younger daughter, the lady Elizabeth. The gruesome murder of one of Elizabeth’s distant relations, rumored to be politically murdered, draws Shardlake and his companion Nicholas to the lady’s summer estate, where a second murder is committed.

As the kingdom explodes into rebellion, Nicholas is imprisoned for his loyalty, and Shardlake must decide where his loyalties lie – with his kingdom, or with his lady?

Format: Audiobook (37h 41m) Publisher: Mantle
Publication date: 18th October 2018 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

I’ve been trying to read all the books longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction since I first started following the prize in 2017. This, the seventh book in the author’s Matthew Shardlake series, was longlisted in 2019.

It’s taken me a long time to get around to reading Tombland, not least because it’s a whopper. I listened to the audiobook which would take you three days to complete if you did it continuously. Needless to say I didn’t, so it took me more like three weeks. The Matthew Shardlake series is one of the few series where I’ve read all the books and – crucially – in the right order, starting back in 2013 with Dissolution. Having said that, it’s coming up for ten years since I read the previous book in the series, Lamentation, and it’s the first time I’ve consumed one as an audiobook. (Although very good, I did find Steven Crossley’s narration on the slow side so chose to increase the reading speed.)

The book starts off as a crime mystery with Shardlake tasked by Henry VIII’s younger daughter, the Lady Elizabeth, to investigate the gruesome murder of Edith, the wife of John Boleyn, a distant relation of Elizabeth’s mother Anne. John Boleyn has been accused of the crime and is set to stand trial at Norwich Assizes. He appears to have means, motive and opportunity, especially since his alibi for the night of the murder is questionable. But as Shardlake and his young assistant Nicholas Overton discover, there are others who might want Boleyn’s wife dead or want Boleyn found guilty of her murder, executed and his land forfeited. There’s also the mystery of Edith’s unexplained disappearance nine years earlier. Just where did she go and why did she return after all that time?

At this point, the story goes off at a tangent, a rather lengthy tangent it has to be said. Shardlake, Nicholas and Shardlake’s former assistant Jack Barak find themselves caught up in an uprising taking place in protest against the enclosure of common land and other grievances against the landowners. In Norfolk it’s led by the charismatic Robert Kett and the rebels soon establish a large camp outside Norwich, at the time England’s second largest city. Barak throws in his lot with the rebels while Nicholas, opposed to them, becomes a prisoner in Norwich Castle and Shardlake finds himself legal advisor to Kett, trying to mitigate the penalties inflicted on the gentry tried at the rebel’s makeshift court. Inwardly he has sympathy with the rebels’ cause but dare not make it public and, as he constantly reminds himself, he must ensure John Boleyn receives justice.

The events of the so-called Kett’s Rebellion are described in detail and is obviously the result of much research. I confess my interest waned at this point and I was eager to get back to the murder mystery, which the book eventually does.

There are also secondary plots involving Shardlake’s former servant Josephine and her husband, Barak’s wife’s continuing animosity towards Shardlake, and the increasing frailty of Shardlake’s longtime friend Guy.

The Shardlake of Tombland is feeling his age. There are frequent references to his aching back and the exhaustion he feels after days of travel. There is an elegaic quality to the book, although apparently the author was working on the next book at the time of his death. Although not my favourite of the series, Tombland definitely demonstrates the author’s ability to combine historical fact and fiction.

In three words: Intriguing, atmospheric, immersive
Try something similar: Sacrilege by S. J. Parris

About the Author

C J Sansom was born in 1952 in Edinburgh. He achieved a BA and then a PhD in History from Birmingham University. After working in a variety of jobs, he retrained as a solicitor and practised in Sussex, until becoming a full-time writer. He combined both history and law in his debut novel Dissolution – which took readers into the dark heart of Tudor England in a gripping novel of monastic treachery and death. This success sparked the bestselling Shardlake series, set in the reigns of Henry VIII and young Edward VI, and following the sixteenth-century lawyer-detective Matthew Shardlake and his assistant Jack Barak. C J Sansom died on 27th April 2024 aged 71.