30 May 2013 02:27:40
Ah, I see what's in store for us: pastiche Anglo-Saxon. This could, I worried, get tiresome; and I wondered whether using terms like "five-toes" for "feet" and "five-fingers" for "hands" throughout, when I have a very strong hunch that both Anglo-Saxon and Norman had perfectly serviceable words for "feet" and "hands", might not get irritating after a while.
It doesn't. By showing a language in flux, tapestry draws you into its world: that of the creation of the Bayeux tapestry (which, as we are reminded in the book by an exasperated narrator, isn't a tapestry at all, but a work of embroidery) by a group of nuns in the late 11th century at a priory in Kent. (The theory that it was commissioned by Bishop Odo, William the Conqueror's half-brother, and stitched in England, very possibly in Kent, has the full endorsement of Professor Wikipedia.)
Medieval works lend themselves to the picaresque, or multiple narration – think of The Decameròn or The Canterbury Tales. So while there is an overarching narrative, that of the commission and creation of the tapestry, work is paused while each nun tells a story related to her work. If you look at the tapestry, you will remember, or notice, that there are numerous extraneous designs along the borders that would appear to have nothing to do with the matter of the Norman usurpation. Terry has noticed, as have others, the Aesopian motifs that occur, and includes slender, playful versions, sometimes modernised, of Aesop's fables himself. My favourite is one in which a lion, confronting Aesop, asks him to tell him a fable before the lion eats him. So Aesop says he was confronted by a lion who asked him to tell a fable ... and so on; and eventually the lion gets bored and goes away.
Terry has form when it comes to yanking the old into the new: his 2002 collection Shakespeare's Sonnets turns the line "from fairest creatures we desire increase" into "Clone Kylie". And so we shouldn't worry at all about the linguistic anachronisms in tapestry. This isn't so much a dialogue between the ancient and the modern as a kind of banter: the narrator, who is also a soothsayer, is teased for predicting Harold's victory against the Norman invader; only too late does she realise she'd been thinking about his defeat of the Vikings at Stamford Bridge: "Oon army looks mych lyk anothir these dags – thats what makes things so difficult. Alle that distinguishes them es the har: the Normans wear it short and shave the back of the cou ... the Vikings, the hariest by far, go for the full beard plus har extensions." (You get into the rhythm and language very soon; it's probably easier than getting to grips with A Clockwork Orange.)
This, Terry's first major prose work as far as I know, is, as pompous book reviewers like to say, A Major Achievement. (It's a nice touch, incidentally, that the publisher is based in Hastings.) It's fun, it's intelligent, it makes you contemplate the age with new interest, and yet it does not shirk from depicting the grim realities of life at the time. In some way the language it uses protects us a little from the real pain that is in here: the plagues, the blindings, the tortures, the perils, the indifference to human life in close embrace with respect for it. But it will also rouse you into indignation at what those Norman bastards did to the people of this country when they arrived.
