22 - 28 February 2001
Issue No.522
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 22 - 28 February 2001 Issue No.522 |
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Plain Talk
I have just put down a book that seems to be provoking sensational arguments and vehement controversies. It is Simon Schama's A History of Britain at the Edge of the World: 3500BC-1603AD, turned into a television series by the BBC, and one that has attracted both wide acclaim and millions of viewers. According to one critic, Schama's chronology and selection of events is "in many ways deeply conventional." Yet as David Aaronovitch contends, the book has two deeply satisfying properties. The first concerns Schama's intellectual edge and verbal facility. "He questions the veracity of sources, balances various accounts and contextualises succinctly and accurately." The second, continues Aaronovitch, "is that when Schama builds in new information, it has all the more impact for having been set in the older story."
After reading it, for my part, I might add a third quality, namely, the entertaining, narrative character of the book. It reads like a long fairy tale. As the story unfolds, the author tackles early tribal life, the first major settlements in the British Isles, the Norman Conquest, the religious wars and political turmoils of the Middle Ages and finally the reign of Elizabeth I. All the changes that beset Britain through the ages are depicted here with remarkable finesse, and as the inside flap tells the reader, the author manages to invent a narrative framework "both traditional and excitingly new". Alongside the fates of kings and queens, the author includes numerous tales of quite ordinary people.
Though I enjoyed the whole book, certain stories excercised a particular hold on my mind -- whether because I had studied them at university or because they had happened to come my way at some other time.
Schama writes about the Venerable Bede's Chronicle, for example, the Latin Ecclesiastical History of England. Bede, in Schama's words, "is the first consummate English story-teller; an artful retailer of wonders, a writer of brilliantly imaginative prose... He was a clear-eyed observer of the earthiness of the Anglo-Saxon world."
Bede was also a great defender of the Christian faith. Before he died in AD753, he had worried about "whether the Christian tree of belief had been planted deeply enough" to survive the threats he saw coming in the shape of the pagan Norsemen, and a militant Muslim who had "thrust deep into the heart of Christian Spain and France". By the end of his life, Bede was well known for his a vehement attacks on Islam.
Schama has his own theory about the Viking invasions of England. The idea of the early Vikings as commercial travellers "singing their sagas as they rowed to a new market opening" does not convince him. And he points out that they captured women and sold them as slaves. In AD869, for example, 1,000 such slaves were taken from Armagh in a single, brutal raid.
Another story that fascinated me was that of the bitter quarrel between Henry II and Thomas à Becket, the latter, according to Schama, the first Londoner to make a mark on English history. Having read Murder in the Cathedral, I was drawn to the spiritual conflict between the two characters. Becket becomes a close friend of the king's, developing the confidence to treat him as an equal, until they become enemies. Attempting to flee, Becket is spotted by sailors, who take him back to the king.
"Why do you want to leave?" asked Henry. "Don't you think the country is big enough to hold both of us?"
Sachma describes the climactic cathedral scene beautifully: "Becket proceeded calmly to the cathedral... Instead of bolting the door, he made sure to open it to receive the congregation... But before they could enter the church in any numbers, the knights caught up with Becket... Naked swords glimmered in the candlelight, and there were axes to smash in resisting doors."
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