FEAST OR FAMINE

  Sparrow  by James Hynes (2023) is set in ancient times at the end of the Roman Empire.  Jacob is the last survivor of an abandoned British-run Roman fishing town, Carthago Nova, on the Spanish coast. He wants to set down his history before he dies along with the dying empire. He promises the reader that he won’t lie, but because he is ‘just another author no one will ever remember’, and this is just another book that changes nothing’ he creates his own identity: the Sparrow. He begins as a child in his mother Euterpe’s kitchen and herb-garden, before he moves into the tavern and the rooms upstairs. His life is of poverty in a town of rich markets, temples, taverns, and mansions. But life is changing – the city’s religion is changing. The city is transforming from pagan rituals to new moral codes and the basis of Christianity. The emporers of the city are twin boys Romulus ad Remus. Romulus had big plans for a city called Rome but Remus made fun of him and was killed for...

 

Joan of Arc  by Mary Gordon (2000) is described as the ‘provocative biography’ of France’s Joan of Arc who, female, illiterate, and seventeen years old, led an army to defeat the English in the fifteenth century.   Joan of Arc (1412-1431) - Jeanne d'Arc - had early victories, but was essentially a failed soldier, a young girl in men’s clothes, and a ‘lunatic’ with voices in her head, who was captured, sent to trial, condemned as a demonic heretic, and burned to death at the age of nineteen. It took 500 years for the Catholic church to apologize, pardon her, and make her a saint in 1920.     Why is she so revered?   Her success was brief – five to nine months ‘at best’ – the rest was a series of defeats, and her life was lost early. Yet all of her predicitons came true.    There have been thousands of books about the brief life of Joan of Arc, but this one asks questions and seeks answers. Why would a young rural girl listen to voices in her head t...