Fiction
Heresy, by S.J. Parris, $25.95
By Anna Mundow
Washington Post Writers Group
If proliferation is a sign of health, then the most vigorous member of the historical novel species must surely be the religious thriller. The latest example of this thriving subgenre is “Heresy,” by S.J. Parris, who wastes no time getting to the point.
“They have sent for the Father Inquisitor,” a desperate monk whispers to his cellmate. “There is no time to lose.” Along with this rallying cry — the first of many — we can practically hear the galloping of hooves and the creaking of thumbscrews.
The monk in question is Giordano Bruno, the 16th-century Neapolitan philosopher. We meet our hero in 1576, in the monastery’s latrine, where he has retreated to read Erasmus’ forbidden “Commentaries.”
Discovered by his superiors, he is soon on the run, making first for “the lion’s maw” of Rome. The main plot, however, is planted firmly on English ground. At the behest of Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, Bruno reluctantly agrees to use his time at Oxford University — where he has been invited to debate the rector — to investigate a suspected papist conspiracy against the Protestant crown.
Foul weather and dank courtyards, both vividly described, conceal not only dissent, it turns out, but murder. First the college sub-rector is killed by a half-starved wolfhound, unleashed by an unseen hand. Then, as subsequent murders terrorize the college, the rector asks Bruno to investigate.
The fact that each gruesome murder is apparently inspired by the executions depicted in John Foxe’s “Actes and Monuments,” a chronicle of Protestant martyrdom, hints at a papist killer. Or is this merely a ruse?
Bruno commands our attention and our sympathy as any likable heretic should. “I hate no-one,” he declares as his own death seems imminent, “I want only to be left in peace to understand the mysteries of the universe in my own way.” To which the murderer sneeringly replies, “Ah. Tolerance.”
By this stage, the plot has — perhaps belatedly — broken out of claustrophobic Oxford and made for the countryside, where the long-anticipated galloping hooves finally arrive.
Nonfiction
Being With Animals: Why We Are Obsessed With the Furry, Scaly, Feathered Creatures Who Populate Our World, by Barbara J. King, $24.99
By Sarah Halzack
Washington Post Writers Group
Animals are an integral part of our lives and culture. We can find them in children’s books as talking characters, in our living rooms snuggled up on the couch or on our dinner plates next to a heap of mashed potatoes.
In “Being with Animals,” anthropologist Barbara J. King explains how this unique relationship came to be by tracing it back to our earliest human ancestors.
Today, as they have since the beginning, King writes, “Animals give life to humans through milk, meat, and wool, enhance human life through labor and companionship, (and) ward off the unknowability and danger of the wild by bringing it closer or under human influences.” The details she provides about the origins of domestication are particularly fascinating.
Despite our success in domesticating dogs, goats and cats, humans tried and failed to tame raccoons, gazelles and moose. This has led some anthropologists to conclude that domestication works only when there are rewards for both species.
But humans and animals do more than help one another subsist. Animals are central to human rituals and religious beliefs that span continents and millennia — evidence, King argues, of a deeper, soulful bond. Ancient Egyptians worshiped cats and mummified them before burial, while Islam, Christianity and Buddhism all value a sense of compassion toward animals.
King delves deep into the positive and constructive relationships humans have had with animals, but treads rather lightly in examining the flip side. Animal cruelty, animal testing and big agriculture’s sometimes deplorable treatment of livestock are certainly not examples of reciprocal, heartwarming human-animal interactions.
If the premise of this book is that humans benefit from showing consideration for animals, then how do we explain so much human neglect and abuse of animals?
