Hidden Cloisters of the Academy: Two Books Reviewed

The Rebel Angels, by Robertson Davies: A
The Face in the Frost, by John Bellairs: B+

You have to love those Renaissance-era scholars. I mean they were just so cute. They had all the brains, but (saving Aristotle and his buds, a Roman or two, and a double handful of carefully ignored Arab luminaries) a shortage of giants with big shoulders–so much of the arrogance they had, but so little of the being right about stuff. So the unfortunate (or comical, depending on your disposition) aspect of all that scientific awakening was that real empirical theory had to go through its requisite hocus-pocus phase. You couldn’t keep the alchemy, the Hermeticism, the astrology–and certainly not the accepted mystical dogma of the Roman Catholic Church–out of the more legitimate scientific pursuits. You may want to ask a real historian, but there can be no coincidence that the reformers started to take swipes at the pope’s miter at roughly the same time that the scientists began to challenge the sacred natural assumptions. The two centuries or so that separated the original Doctor Mirablis (1214-1294) from the loopy Doctor von Hohenheim (1493-1553) seem a hell of a lot shorter than the one century that separated the latter from Newton and Pascal. (Even the scant decade between Paracelsus’ death and Galileo’s bawling entry into the world seems like it must have held a metric eternity tucked away in it.)

Davies takes a fun stab at academia in The Rebel Angels. It’s set, according to the book jacket, in a modern University, but his characters are medieval and Renassaince scholars mostly, and share much of their personalities with their antiquated research subjects. The professors are secluded, romantically stunted, bookish, collegial types with well-defined relations to the holy church (Anglican of course, we’re talking Canada). One is even a degenerate, renegade monk. Even the science professors are shown pursuing ridiculous antique theories on body shape and bathroom habits, and theorizing about determinism of character. Davies presents the sort of academy that Rabelais envisioned, a utopia infested with amusing and obscene crackpots. (Davies even offers a running lowbrow theme of scatology, to which he manages to give an intellectual gloss, succeeding at the impossible task of turd-polishing). I wish I could tell you whether Davies does Rabelais credit in this modern reimagining, but as usual, I’m under-read on the primary sources. I will tell you that he does a hell of a job in his own right.

Which isn’t surprising. Robertson Davies is just a hell of a writer. He crams in observation and philosophical detail to beat some of the windier geniuses I’ve reviewed (Mark Helprin, say, or Don DeLillo), but damn, he does it with lean prose and laser-precise (though not always laser-accurate) observations. The characterization is deeply detailed, and as a bonus, in The Rebel Angels, compared to some of the other Davies books I’ve read, I actually liked these people. And it’s fun. Davies reads like he was having a blast as he wrote this, and it comes through in the reading.

I’ve a few nitpicks, of course. Davies doesn’t fail to include a conspicuous Canadian-ness to this novel (a distinction which seems such a Canadian thing to stress).* He also has an unforgivable penchant for trilogies, but in this case I may break my own proscription against reading the same author twice in a row. My more serious complaint is that the novel doesn’t map very well to my own time in the academy. Davies takes a rather conservative definition of the liberal arts in this book, relegating by action (if not design) engineering and the physical sciences to the realm of lesser trades. (One of his best scenes is a faculty dinner, and he succeeds at being esoteric and irreverent, but I so wanted the computer scientist or the astronomer to pipe up and do something respectable.) I didn’t spend a lot of time with those grad students, but I strongly suspect that their bosses had no more opportunity to occupy rarefied realms of pure thought than did the science and engineering advisors, and similarly had to divert a lot of research ideas to their students for tutelage and to also harvest the work of their busy young brains and hands. And any discipline that requires funding can only afford to be so removed from conferences, and marketing, and demonstrating some value of the effort. (Though arrogant liberal arts types have told me differently–I’ve got a small chip on my shoulder, it appears.) I only hope that Davies’ parodies of classicists and historians are as biting as his parody of a biologist, but frankly, he seems to love those former types of people a lot more. If I were writing this (if well I could), I’d have gone more with the crazy alchemy.**

One of the many historical sins I committed in the preceding paragraphs, was trying to shoehorn Roger Bacon into the Renaissance. I mean, you had to love the guy, what with the pursuing of empiricism in the midst of the Inquisition and all (and not without consequences), but his scientific awakening was a little premature in the context of things.

The Face in the Frost is a book that’s been on the to-read list for ten years or so, a much-loved work among various communities of sf nerds. Every time I went to the crappy local used book stores, this one was (alphabetically at any rate) near the beginning of the typically futile search. The series of strictly young adult books with which Bellairs followed this one pollute the Barnes and Noble shelves of course, but Face is a little deeper in tone, on the cusp of young vs. merely adult, and I never found it in the major chains next to the others (although, I just discovered, it was reprinted in 2000).

The Face in the Frost was written in 1969, inspired, by the author’s admission, during the mania over Lord of the Rings, but even though it contains wizards, I think that one reason it’s acclaimed is that it (thankfully) reads nothing like old man Tolkien, but rather feels like it’s its own animal, drawing magic more from the hidden cloisters of the academy than it does from the forgotten spirits of the earth. Instead of pairing it with the YA stuff I’m reading to my kids, it will be against other amiable dramas featuring other such monkish eccentrics.

Our own two oddballs, the sorcerers Prospero (not the one you’re thinking of) and Roger Bacon (yes that one, but with embellishments), are faced with an external sense of dread: some ghostly presence is trying to influence itself on the fictional North and South kingdoms, and possibly even on the rest of Europe, and it’s got an eye out for Prospero particularly. The two wizards tramp through a sometimes ghostly landscape of growing fear and suspicion trying to find its source.

There are horrors in this novel, but they are of the more suspenseful and cerebral sort, scary because the well-adjusted (and well-described) characters find them so. There are ghosts, trolls, phantom villages. Bellairs does a good job of finding the spaces in the mundane into which spectral terrors can fit, which makes them, in spots, actually unnerving. As a balance for this, Prospero and Bacon are such likable, sincere, and genial sorts, never far from a pipe or a pint, ready to expound with humor and pointless erudition, that the reader never really doubts a favorable resolution. The tone is cheerful and unapologetically anachronistic, and if the book is a little episodic, the plot a little ad hoc, it’s mostly forgiven.

It’s a book to appeal to those cluttered sorts of bibliophiles and collectors too. Every likable character has a house full of knickknacks and musty tomes, all neglected by their owners but lovingly described. If there’s a flaw in any of the primary characters (including the villain), it’s the tendency to pursue knowledge for its own sake and damn the consequences. Bellairs’ qualification to what probably got him into the YA market from this point on: a good heart can be trusted.

Do you buy that? I don’t, but then I’m an adult.

* Don’t get me wrong, I love Canadians. They’re like Minnesotans with diction, or Mainers with teeth (and diction). I’ve yet to meet a Canadian man who couldn’t out-fight, out-skate, and out-drink me, and never seen a population of males who can wear mustaches with such comfortable ease. Canadian women are real women, their clipped accents are indescribably cute, they’re lean and strong, with not one of ‘em a useless dainty effete. I only wish I was ever man enough to fight any of their brothers. (Plus their government isn’t filled with the same brand of authoritarian jingo-slinging imperialists as mine, and they’ve got a health care system that sorta works.)

** Actually I know where the crazy alchemy goes. Right to Dan Brown. This series of readings got truncated.