John the Pupil

January 26, 2015
In this multilayered, intellectually challenging historical novel, Flusfeder (The Gift) considers medieval science, religion, and education through a young scholar’s journey from Oxford, England, to Viterbo, Italy. In 1267, real-life freethinker Roger Bacon sends off John, his fictional favorite pupil, accompanied by strong, silent Brother Bernard and sweet-tempered Brother Andrew, on the pretense of a pilgrimage, to deliver a copy of Bacon’s Opus Majus and samples of his inventions to the Pope. At Canterbury, they meet Simeon the Palmer, a pilgrim-for-hire who supplements his income by robbing other pilgrims. In France, John finds contentment tending a garden in a monastery. At Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti’s Italian palace, John’s companions find temptation. By the time John reaches the Pope, he has experienced friendship and conflict, witnessed sin and martyrdom, suffered loss and doubt. The core of the novel is John’s first-person chronicle of the adventures, interspersed with fables and legends of saints, capturing the violence, superstition, and spirituality characteristic of the Middle Ages. Academic endnotes amplify selected references: Cavalcanti, for example, appears in Dante’s Inferno, waiting for his son, the Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti. The footnotes’ excruciating erudition belie the fact that they are essential reading: they provide place names along the pilgrims’ progress, they both support and undermine the faux chronicle’s credibility, and they include the author’s passionate rant against historical fiction; this is, after all, an antihistorical historical novel.

January 1, 2015
Flusfeder (A Film by Spencer Ludwig, 2010, etc.) entrusts John the Pupil with placing Roger Bacon's Great Work in the hands of Pope Clement IV.John is a peasant boy plucked from his village near Oxford's Franciscan monastery. Clever and malleable, he's the single student to survive polymath Bacon's rigorous tutelage. "I am the mirror he is constructing, to reflect him back to himself," John discovers before he breaks free of obedience. In 1267, with companions Brother Andrew, "dainty and girlish," and Brother Bernard, "silent and large and phlegmatic, half-doltish," John is charged with carrying Bacon's Opus Majus-containing "Truth. Wisdom. The meanings of past and future times, the details of the construction of devices that some men might call miraculous"-from Oxford to the pope in Viterbo, Italy. Flusfeder frames his novel as John's contemporary journal, one discovered, neglected, rediscovered. The journal's marked by saint's days, each chapterlike segment highlighted by short biographies of saints known and obscure. The characters John meets are metaphorical: corrupt and duplicitous Simeon the Palmer, a rogue paid by others to do penance; Father Gabriel, "a superior soul," who is a "master gardener" who uses his plants to heal; next, amid a war between the Ghibellines and the Guelphs, they encounter a "holy virgin" and find hedonistic luxury within the great lord Cavalcante de Cavalcanti's castle. Each tempts John, especially after he learns Bacon hasn't trusted him completely. John's meeting with Pope Clement offers a poignant denouement, especially Flusfeder's sketch of the aged and weary pontiff. There's distance from the harsh realities of medieval times in the imagined journal text, and the author incorporates a series of notes to explain certain terms and circumstances. This virgin's pilgrimage in service of God and wisdom is more intellectual exercise than tale of intrigue, more allegory than adventure.

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Starred review from January 1, 2015
Flusfeder concocts a medieval quest story in which the three protagonists are pawns kept in the dark as to what their quest is. They're in the dark about much of the world as well because they've been cloistered in a medieval Franciscan friary before starting their journey. The novel skitters between the farce of a Hope-Crosby road movie and the serial victimization of the young wanderer in Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird. Flusfeder uses the device of the found manuscriptin this case, the journal of John, whom the friars in Oxford bought from John's parents when he was nine and who was taught by the head of the friary, Roger Bacon himself. John's fragmented account tells of how he and two other friarsone who is incredibly handsome and prone to satisfy the lust of others and the other harboring a secret obsession with drawing fantastical creaturesare given orders to carry secret goods to Pope Clement IV. They do this on foot, making their way by begging, and suffering often at the hands of villagers who believe they are devils in disguise. Seeing all this through John's both limited and brilliant point of view is astonishing, especially when he describes the intricacies of an illuminated manuscript with entirely fresh eyes.The reader will move from amazement at how dark the Dark Ages were to recognizing the darkness and the hope in our own time.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)