The Time Before You Die by Lucy Beckett, Ignatius Press, £13.99
This superb historical novel, first published in 1999 and now reissued in anticipation of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation next year, is set between the years 1518 and 1559. It tells the story of Robert Fletcher, a Carthusian monk, one of the many hundreds of monks expelled from their monasteries, “frightened old men turned out of their homes into the winter world”, forced out of his charterhouse of Mount Grace in Yorkshire during the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Fletcher’s subsequent tragic life – marriage, the death of his wife after childbirth, his conversion to Lutheranism, his imprisonment and later series of conversations with Cardinal Reginald Pole – is not the usual stuff of novels of this period, dealing as they do (Hilary Mantel’s historical novels are a case in point) with major figures such as Henry, his daughter Elizabeth, Thomas Cranmer and St Thomas More. This is what gives the book its originality and interest, as the reader is led to ask himself what might have happened to such a man as Fletcher, born into the old faith, caught up in the brutal winds of change in the new religion, wrestling with agonising theological questions.
Beckett is not tempted into turning her protagonist into a martyr, as Robert Hugh Benson does in Come Rack! Come Rope! Fletcher is an ordinary man, not especially likeable but worthy of the reader’s pity, struggling with scruples and doubts, trying to follow his conscience as the Church falls about his ears, yet courageously prepared to argue his case with the highly educated, aristocratic archbishop, Reginald Pole, as the latter lies dying in Lambeth Palace.
Indeed, Beckett’s portrait of Pole is one of the best things in the novel. His theological beliefs, his sympathy with some of Luther’s complaints, his long exile from England and his ill-treatment at the hands of his fellow cardinals at the Council of Trent are all beautifully conveyed, either through the author’s device of letters sent back and forth by papal legates and imperial ambassadors at the Tudor court, or in his debates with Fletcher himself.
The reader cannot fail to be caught up in Pole’s impassioned arguments with Fletcher on the position of the Church with regard to heresy: “Once a part of the Church separates itself from the whole and confines its truth and rightness as the church to those who follow a single leader or those who live in a single land, it has lost the authority that it had as part of the whole, the authority of unity, the authority of tradition. Without what it has lost, it must nevertheless curb the folly of fools and restrain the excesses of the reckless, unless each individual man is to become his own church.
“Heretics,” the cardinal concludes sadly, “delude themselves who think that, running from the Church, they run from man to God. They run from God to man. Your church is but a limb cut from the body. The limb will die; the body cannot die.” Prophetic words, most especially in our own time.
The author provides acute psychological studies of the two men, both deeply affected by suffering within their families, and who form an unlikely bond, despite the social and theological gulf between them.
Luther himself comes alive in Pole’s words: “What more did Luther ask for [than repentance and reform] until mere mortal stubbornness, his own and alas, that of others … drove him out of the Church and at last beyond return into the darkness, where his sect is now riven with faction.”
The novel is also crammed with local colour, such as the Yorkshire landscape, the environs of Lambeth Palace and the inside of a Carthusian cell. It brings to life an entire historical period.
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