Book review: Fitzempress' Law, by Diana Norman
This was Diana Norman's first published novel, and copies of it are extremely rare and usually very expensive. I'd always wanted to check it out, so when a careless bookseller posted an only slightly imperfect copy on Abebooks at about a tenth of the going rate, I pounced on it.
It has the same setting, and a good deal of the same subject matter - Henry II, the predicament of medieval Jews - as the dismal Mistress of the Art of Death series that she started writing a quarter of a century later. The difference is, that it's actually damn good.
It's a time-travel novel, and all time-travel novels have to start with a more-or-less ludicrous contrivance to get the story moving; you just have to hold your nose and swallow it. In this case, three young hooligans assault an old woman, who hexes them so that their motorbike crashes and their bodies lie in a coma in hospital while their personalities are transported into the bodies of three young 12th-century Hertfordshire people, each of whom has a major difficulty that can only be solved by recourse to 12th-century law - Henry FitzEmpress' law. Okay: so far, so hokey. But Norman had really immersed herself in re-imagining 12th-century life in Hertfordshire (she set much of the action in the village where she lived, and it's clear she researched it intensively) and trying to create a mind-set for its inhabitants. You might or might not like the choices she made: for example, she, like Alfred Duggan, found a parallel between the Anglo-Norman knightly mindset and that of public school, colonial Englishmen, and gave her above-the-salt characters dialogue to match; and her Jewish characters talk like New York Yiddisher Jews (Reuben the moneylender of Cambridge says to his wife, 'Momma, today we entertain a goy to dinner'). But they are honest and coherent choices. And it's full of the flavour of real medieval life - asides like a note on not only the rarity of hedges in pre-enclosure England, but their edibility (hazels! rosehips! haws! crab apples! Yum!), and characters with genuinely non-modern attitudes. I would seriously recommend it.
How the hell did Norman simply forget everything she had known in 1980 when she came to write the character and milieu of 'Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar' - who is far less convincing in a medieval setting than the time-travelling heroes of this book?
Cross-posted to oltramar