THE BASILISK

The love story of Abelard and Heloise frames a tangled web of medieval intrigue and trauma in this labyrinthine novel.

Herin centers her tale on three historical figures in 12th-century France. They include Peter Abelard, a renowned scholastic philosopher and logician; Heloise, a teenage girl—and a formidable intellectual—whose affair with Abelard ended badly after they secretly married and her irate uncle hired men to castrate him; and Bernard of Clairvaux, a Roman Catholic mystic and founder of the Cistercian order of monks, who charged Abelard with heresy for his rationalistic analysis of Catholic theology. The narrative unfolds mainly in the 1130s, when Heloise has become the abbess of a nunnery, filled with regrets and yearning for Abelard. He is now the abbot of a monastery and trying to stage a comeback as a philosophy professor in Paris, an ambition Bernard is hoping to thwart by lobbying the church to ban him from teaching. The story also imagines Abelard’s youth as a brilliant, arrogant prodigy; Heloise’s as an equally brilliant, passionate girl; and Bernard’s as a sickly young man whose attempts to connect with the world end in migraines and frustration. As Abelard and Heloise wrangle with their pasts, their real-life son, Astrolabe—named by geeky Heloise after an astronomical instrument—sets out to find his parents, whom he hasn’t seen since infancy. Meanwhile, Brother Gauvain, a monk and master builder, investigates a series of murders that may be linked to Abelard and Bernard’s rivalry. The monk’s probe dredges up his youthful experiences as a crusader in Jerusalem, where he participated in the psychedelic rites of the Brotherhood of Saint Anthony, a secret society that may be behind the homicides and plots he is seeking to unravel.

Herin’s yarn weaves fact and fiction into an intricate tapestry that feels a bit like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose overlaid with Knights Templar–ish conspiracies and occult symbolism concerning everything from the magic number five to the titular serpent whose gaze turns men to stone. Around an entertaining mystery, she entwines a deep exploration of the intellectual and spiritual worldview of the Middle Ages, when Christian doctrine was awkwardly absorbing not-quite-logical medieval logic. (“Surely sir, you are not such an imbecile as to not know that universal substance is indivisible…the quality man passes wholly into each individual who thus become men by virtue of the divine substance,” asserts a celebrated brainiac.) Herin’s evocative prose vividly captures the horrific earthiness of medieval life and the mindset that found an ethereal holiness in it. (Out giving alms to dying peasants, Bernard “stared into an ancient and ghastly face, one cheek eaten away, the raw edges of flesh festering with pus and green mucous” and is reminded by his mother that “one learns to smell the sweet sanctity of Christ” in the stench of diseased flesh.) The author’s characters are devoutly religious, but she unearths the psychological tensions roiling beneath sacred rituals. (Receiving Holy Communion from Abelard, Heloise “came away amazed to have actually swallowed it, even as she felt the slight tremor of his fingers as they paused before her face to lay the crust of bread on her tongue.”) The result is an absorbing clash of love, faith, reason, and violence.

A richly textured medieval tale told with gripping suspense, keen intelligence, and aching emotion.