Havoc, in Its Third Year - Ronan Bennet
by Zia ~ August 20th, 2005. Filed under: Books.
It’s England, the early 17th century. Catholics and Protestants are battling. John Brigge is the coroner and one of the governors of an experimental government in a northern town. He is also a closet Catholic. One blustery night, just as his wife has gone into labor, he is summoned from his farm, the Winters, to try an Irishwoman for the death of her child.
Brigge is, more than anything, a just man who firmly believes that “the law sees more clearly when it sometimes is blind.” This attitude slowly gets him into trouble as the law becomes more Puritan–men stealing food for their families are punished as severely as highwaymen; lasses bestowing kisses on their beaus are whipped. He himself is not exempt from sin; although deeply in love with his wife, he has also committed an indiscretion with her ward. The thought torments him.
Because he refuses to obey the law–instead of making an example of the Irishwoman–he does not immediately indict her for killing her child. Instead, he calls for a key witness that was sent out of town. And during this time, he is increasingly regarded with suspicion of his fellow governors–until he himself is called out and jailed for immorality.
Bennet introduces this novel with the statement that “I have seen no evidence to support the assertion that when history repeats itself it does so as a farce. Tragedy, it seems, comes round again and again.”
And while the novel as a parable for our times may have some merit, it’s not what I found so compelling. Many historical novels make the tragic mistake of bestowing a modern perspective on its protagonists; the result is that though they may be illuminating, or educational, or even a just good book, there is still something missing.
Not so for Havoc. This felt as alien to me as a science fiction novel because he so clearly captures the thinking of someone in the 1630s–someone who thinks that eaglestones hung around the neck of his laboring wife will deliver her safely of child, someone who is given to portents and visions, someone who places his fate in God’s hands and trusts in him implicitly. “John Brigge was of the old faith,” says Bennet, and we as readers are drawn into his somber and narrow world.