The True Temple

Beyond the Abbey Gates (formerly The Age of Miracles) a novel by Catherine MacCoun.  Trumpeter.  337 pp.  $15.95.  *****

I defy anyone to read this novel and decide what the author thinks is sacred and what profane; religious, irreligious; the right way to live, the wrong way.  It turns every preconception you have on its head.  You finish wondering what the hell this person thinks.  That’s exactly what I like about it.  It’s the book’s greatest strength.

I would be completely cowed by the idea of writing a historical novel.  This book is set in the fourteenth century, two hundred years before Shakespeare.  How do you handle that?  Do you start each line with the words, Verily, or Forsooth?  MacCoun handles the problem by not fretting about it.  Her characters speak in a slightly formal way, but in perfectly modern English.  The book is beautifully written, with real authority, so we have confidence in the world as she describes it.  Abbey life was no picnic, nor was life outside the gates.  And a plague is waiting at the end of the novel that makes Covid 19 sound like a minor inconvenience.

I read this novel because, obviously, I’m interested in miracles.  I also read it because MacCoun wrote the bewitching and mysterious volume, On Becoming an Alchemist, which I’m still pondering.  I actually read MacCoun’s novel because I hoped it might shed light on that later book (the Trumpeter volumes were published together).  Actually, MacCoun wrote her novel—with the title The Age of Miracles—fifteen years earlier.

Beyond the Abbey Gates opens with what seems an obvious set up.  At an abbey in rural England called Greyleigh, there is a young nun named Ingrid who is reputed to have performed miracles.  She’s nothing if not pious, working constantly at the monastery, staying up all night sometimes to pray, actually wearing a hairshirt.  She works in the abbey’s infirmary, and has been taught her craft by an older nun named Sister Pipp; she understand how to heal with herbs and perform all the standard rituals.  But she has some gift beyond anything the older nun taught her.  She has reputedly cured people of paralysis and leprosy.  The truth is that no one quite understands the power she has, including Ingrid herself, but she is considered a treasure, and her reputation has spread.

Into that setting steps a troubadour named Jacques Brigand des Coeurs (formerly Jack Rudd) who is known all over England for his beautiful singing and his wayward behavior.  He’s off riding to yet another tavern when—what a coincidence—his horse rears and throws him, breaking his ankle, right outside Grayleigh.  One of the world’s great seducers is dropped into a house full of women (they may be nuns, but is that a problem?)  It sounds like the greatest opportunity—and challenge—of his life.

Not really, unfortunately.  For one thing, the place has a vow of silence, which means that one of Jacque’s most attractive qualities—his beautiful singing voice, with his seductive lyrics—is useless.  Furthermore, he’s isolated; only the women who care for him are permitted to see him, the main one being Ingrid.  She sets his leg and lets him know that his recovery will take at least six weeks, which sounds like torture to this garrulous, outgoing man.  When he realizes who’s caring for him, the solution seems simple: perform a miracle and get me the hell out of here!  It would be an act of mercy.  It would be the work of a saint.  But Ingrid either can’t, or won’t, do that.

What follows, from Jacques standpoint, is a long, strategic six-week seduction.  From Ingrid’s point of view, it’s something else altogether.  She is profoundly uncomfortable with her role as a healer, also with the notoriety it has brought her.  She has a huge stack of requests to see her, and at one point she sorts through them and picks out the most grievous ones, at another decides to see everyone, at another she burns the whole stack.  It isn’t that she’s changing her mind about wanting to be a religious person.  She’s changing her mind about what that actually means.

At some point she gives in to Jacques because that seems to be what her deepest self wants.  He, for his part, has fallen in love, and wants to rescue her from the whole situation.  I’m fascinated by situations where the sexual and spiritual are tied up together.  MacCoun has created just such a situation.

What I have described is the first third of the book.  Ingrid does decide, for whatever reason, that her place is outside in the world and not in the abbey.  She has a golden opportunity: Jacques has offered to take her away, and after making his eventual exit from the scene, returns that evening to pick her up again.  But Ingrid decides (once again making her life difficult) that she needs to strike out on her own, and she flees the abbey by herself, a perilous move in those days.  Her life opens up, and so does the novel.  I breathed a huge sigh of relief once we got out of that place.

Ingrid and Jacques’ lives are fascinating from that point on.  At every juncture where she seems to have an opening to free herself, she does the opposite (to give an easy example, from late in the book, she has a chance to leave the country after the plague breaks out but stays to try to heal people).  I don’t think her life is less religious outside the monastery.  I think it’s moreso.  As a cloistered nun once said to my teacher Larry Rosenberg, gesturing to the outside world: “That is the real temple.”

MacCoun doesn’t give you the answer about what is a truly healing, religious life.  She keeps you asking the question (though I do think she’s saying that the existing institutions haven’t found it yet).  But Ingrid and Jacques must have karma together (to veer into another spiritual tradition).  Their lives keep converging, as we wonder if they will finally come together.

The novel’s conclusion seems just right.