Dissolution

1) "'Oh, a few orders live straitly. But don't forget the Carthusians died because they refused to recognize the king as head of the Church. They all want the pope back. And now it seems one of them has turned to murder.' I sighed. 'I am sorry you must be involved in this.' 'Men of honour should not be afraid of danger.' 'One should always be afraid of danger.'"

2) "'On what evidence? And how question them, the torture? I thought you disapproved of such methods.' 'Of course not. But — stiff questioning?' 'And what if I am wrong, and it is not one of them at all? And how would we keep such a mass arrest secret?' 'But — time and danger press.' 'Do you think I don't know that?' I burst out in sudden anger. 'But bullying won't fetch out the truth. Singleton tried that and look where it got him. You untangle a knot with slow teasing, not sharp pulling, and believe me we have here a knot such as I have never seen. But I will unpick it. I will.'"

3) "He stared at me. When he spoke again it was almost a whisper. 'You should have seen this house just five years ago, before the king's divorce. Everything ordered and secure. Prayer and devotion, the summer timetable then the winter, unchanging, centuries old. The Benedictines have given me such a life as I could never have had in the world; a ship's chandler's son raised to abbot.' He gave a sad flicker of a smile. 'It's not just myself I mourn for, Commissioner; it's the tradition, the life. Already these last two years order has started to break down. We all used to have the same beliefs, think the same way, but already the reforms have brought discord, disagreement. And now murder. Dissolution,' he whispered. 'Dissolution.' I saw two great tears take form in the corners of his eyes. 'I will sign the Instrument of Surrender,' he said quietly. 'I have no alternative, have I?' I shook my head slowly."

4) "Looking at the stone cadaver I had a sudden vision of Orphan's decomposed body rising from the water, then of the diseased rickety children at Smeaton's house. I had a sudden sick feeling that our revolution would do no more than change starveling children's names from those of the saints to Fear-God and Zealous. I thought of Cromwell's casual mention of creating faked evidence to hound innocent people to death, and of Mark's talk of the greedy suitors come to Augmentations for grants of monastic lands. This new world was no Christian commonwealth; it never would be. It was in truth no better than the old, no less ruled by power and vanity. I remembered the gaudy, hobbled birds shrieking mindlessly at each other and it seemed to me like an image of the king's court itself, where papists and reformers fluttered and gabbled, struggling for power. And in my wilful blindness I had refused to see what was before my eyes. How men fear the chaos of the world, I thought, and the yawning eternity hereafter. So we build patterns to explain its terrible mysteries and reassure ourselves we are safe in this world and beyond."

[ spoilers ]

5) "'She is right, there is nowhere safe in the world now, no thing certain. Sometimes I think of Brother Edwig and his madness, how he thought he could buy God's forgiveness for those murders with two panniers of stolen gold. Perhaps we are all a little mad. The Bible says God made man in his image but I think we make and remake him, in whatever image happens to suit our shifting needs. I wonder if he knows or cares. All is dissolving, Brother Guy, all is dissolution.' We stood silent, watching the seabirds bobbing on the river, while behind us echoed the distant sound of crashing lead."

Historical novels are not my favourite genre, as I tend to spend too much time looking for anachronisms, but [a:C.J. Sansom|80212|C.J. Sansom|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1236778813p2/80212.jpg] seems to get around that. I first read his [b:Winter in Madrid|891671|Winter in Madrid|C.J. Sansom|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347651080s/891671.jpg|2114967], set in the Spanish Civil War, and then [boo:Dominion], which is a kind of "what if" novel -- what if the UK had surrendered to Germany after the fall of France in 1940?

[b:Dissolution|138685|Dissolution (Matthew Shardlake, #1)|C.J. Sansom|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1329914905s/138685.jpg|133702] is set in the period of the English Reformation in the 1530s, at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, and is a combination of historical novel and whodunit, a genre popularised by [a:Umberto Eco|1730|Umberto Eco|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1319590745p2/1730.jpg]'s [b:The Name of the Rose|119073|The Name of the Rose|Umberto Eco|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1350764307s/119073.jpg|3138328].

In [b:Dissolution|138685|Dissolution (Matthew Shardlake, #1)|C.J. Sansom|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1329914905s/138685.jpg|133702] Thomas Cromwell, who masterminded the English Reformation, sends a commissioner to the monastery of St Donatus at Scarnsea on the Sussex coast to arrange for its dissolution and surrender. The commissioner is murdered, so Cromwell sends another, Matthew Shardlake, a lawyer, to continue the work of the first one and also to investigate the murder.

I ought to know something about the English Reformation, but I don't know as much as I should. When I studied church history at St Chad's College, Durham, in the 1960s, it formed quite a large part of the syllabus, but it was not a period that particularly interested me. I was more interested in the missionary period, which, where historical novels are concerned, is covered by [a:Melvyn Bragg|41858|Melvyn Bragg|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-ccc56e79bcc2db9e6cdcd450a4940d46.png]'s [b:Credo|481399|Credo|Melvyn Bragg|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1175116748s/481399.jpg|728878]. I suppose that's why I became a missiologist rather than a church historian.

Reading [b:Dissolution|138685|Dissolution (Matthew Shardlake, #1)|C.J. Sansom|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1329914905s/138685.jpg|133702] reminded me of why I did not much like reading about that period of history, whether church or secular history. There is no doubt that the English Church wanted reforming, but the cure was worse than the disease, and [a:C.J. Sansom|80212|C.J. Sansom|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1236778813p2/80212.jpg] brings this out clearly in his novel. None of the characters is particularly admirable. The protagonist, Matthew Shardlake, suffers from a physical deformity, which seems to reflect a spiritual deformity as well; he is naive and ambitious. He does have a sense of justice, but when push comes to shove, it makes way for ambition and political correctness every time.

One of the things I did know about Thomas Cromwell was that he ordered the clergy to keep registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, which I have found useful for family history, among other things, but most of what he did seems to have been bad, and motivated by greed and ambition. I have little reason to suppose that [a:C.J. Sansom|80212|C.J. Sansom|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1236778813p2/80212.jpg] got his character very wrong. So the book gives something of the flavour of the times, even if the actual events it describes are fictitious.

But like much historical writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, it also carries "the burden of the present". [a:George Orwell|3706|George Orwell|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1374989696p2/3706.jpg]'s [b:Animal Farm|7613|Animal Farm|George Orwell|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327872845s/7613.jpg|2207778] is an allegory, a parable about how revolutions consume their own children. It is set in a differnt period, and uses different literary techniques, but the same message comes through. The dissolution in the title of the book is not merely about the dissolution of the monasteries as institutions, but the dissolution of the people whose lives are disrupted in the process, and the dissolution of the English Reformation into a cesspool of corruption and greed.

And so there is much in it that reminds me of the dissolution of South African democracy, twenty years after its inauguration, where the high ideals with which we began have dissolved into patronage, greed and corruption. Apartheid was South Africa's Lent, 1994 was its Easter, the following 7 years were its Bright Week, and now it is winding down.

The character in the book for whom I felt most sympathy was the exiled Carthusian, Jerome, who was regarded as mad and dangerous, but retained something of the original monastic ideals, and his integrity.