A book about books – and a mystery. What could be better? A contented and comfortable owner of a bookshop in 17th century London receives a curious summons to an isolated country estate where he is tasked with finding a lost manuscript.
Ex-Libris by Ross King is a double journey throughout Renaissance Europe alternating the travels of the current bookseller with those of a book smuggler, forty years earlier. An erudite version of The DaVinci Code, Ex-Libris is filled with mysterious organizations, secret codes, and menacing spies.
What there is to not like is the interminable name dropping – of European royalty, Thirty Years War events, religious factions, arcane authors and esoteric books. Ross King is a PhD, scholar, lecturer, and respected nonfiction author. In this work of fiction, he has trouble leaving out even one piece of information. Historical fiction fans will find this a treasure.
Despite the surfeit of facts, the flavor of the times seeps through. There is the setting: the stench of the filthy Thames; snow blowing into an already freezing carriage; turnips and fish for breakfast. There is the value and importance of books and libraries: kings buy and sell them; the church, ever fearful, suppresses or destroys them; smugglers steal them. Each political group demands unquestioning loyalty to its beliefs. Bernie Sanders and AOC would have had a very hard time.
As expected in a novel about books and words, descriptions are vivid and compelling. For example, sailors at sea receive an unpleasant surprise: “But slowly a storm front appeared on the eastern horizon, implacable and bruise-black, and began edging its way across the sky like the shadow of an approaching giant. The deck-beams creaked noisily and water poured through the scuttles. Then the first of the spume broke over the bows…”
Unusual words gave my dictionary a workout. I thought claudications might be a 17th century word, but no, it’s technical, and probably one our age group should know – leg cramps. My favorite was a “clowder” of cats (more than two).
I loved that one of the most valuable books described turned out to be an original by Galileo with his own precise calculations explaining that longitude at sea could be found by a using a chart of the eclipses of Jupiter’s moons. The things we learn from reading!
Since I recently enjoyed The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey, a novel based on a fairy tale, I was intrigued when I came across The Uses of Enchantment, The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.
Bruno Bettelheim, the respected child psychologist, wrote this nonfiction work in the 1970’s about the universal hidden meanings and symbols designed to help children progress through the necessary stages of development. Honed through centuries, fairy tales “translate internal processes into visual images.”
This is a dense book and discussions of the detailed psychological meanings of individual fairy tales became too much. I was out of my depth, but I got the general idea. Many express anger at the “wicked” (step) mother who is no longer willing to do everything for her child; Red Riding Hood has mixed feelings about the wolf in her bed; Jack needs to slay the ogre (bullying, drunkenness) that lives in his (bean) stalk and use his masculinity to provide and protect. My, my. Who knew? These stories speak to the child’s unconscious, offering relief and encouragement, nudging the child on the path to independence with the goal of “living happily ever after.”
Although fairy tales define this phrase in traditional ways: children leave home; the girl marries; the boy provides; we can extrapolate and understand it in terms suitable to the 21st century. The necessity of striking out on one’s own, finding someone to love and be with, learning an acceptable way to provide for oneself, all ring true as timeless roads to happiness.
They also sound like prescriptions for the very young adult, which is as far as fairy tales take us. But Bettelheim describes the search for meaning as a whole life’s work, and I like to think that literature carries on the fairy tale’s task, with opportunities for more to come. As we live longer, pathways for seniors finding meaning in very different life situations are waiting to be explored and thoughtfully crafted into new stories.
The universality of fairy tales was underlined recently at an exhibit of Japanese woodblock prints in the Portland Japanese Garden. Several were the old style, mainly used to advertise Kabuki plays in the 1800’s.
One of the plays was about a jealous, power-hungry stepmother who plots against her new daughter. Could she have been the stepdaughter with a tiny foot that would fit easily into a certain glass slipper? Cinderella is a very old story, first written down in China during the ninth century A.D. and well known in the East before that.
Bettelheim says that fairy tales have happy endings – appropriate for encouraging a child. This is very different from Greek myths, usually male dominated war stories focusing on the violence and brutality of life. Claire Heywood, in Daughters of Sparta, gives voice to two of the most infamous women of myth, Helen of Troy and her sister Klytemnestra.
Heywood shows the lack of agency of the two girls who are given by their father to older warriors to cement political alliances. After marriage things don’t change; they are expected to be demure and obedient, produce heirs, and accept their husbands’ lovers. But stifled feelings will out and step by logical step we see idealistic girls become disenchanted women, one of whom leaves her husband for another and is partially responsible for a ten-year war. The other murders her military general husband the day he comes home victorious. Heywood’s sympathetic treatment of the women in this historical fiction offers reasonable possibilities for such actions. And – we get a great brush up on Greek mythology.
Not far away and coming soon, Christmas is right around the corner. Our book group celebrated with an exchange of our favorite kind of gifts.
I love the way you tie the fairy tale theme to the beautiful woodcuts at the Japanese Garden.
Unfortunately the Greek myths did not teach life lessons like the fairy and folk tales of more modern times unless it was “placate the gods and hope for the best”
You saved me from actually reading the book about fairy tales. And your own commentary was a great lesson/summary of the book. It encourages me to pay attention to fairy tales. Also it reminds me that most (all?) of Mother Goose is political commentary and its fun to read them with an eye to that history.