The finest literary historical novel in a long time, Emily Maguire’s RAPTURE is a rich, multi layered and profoundly satisfying read.
Sensuous and spell binding, RAPTURE brings the legend of a female pope to fully fleshed and rapturous fruition, a rip roaring tale told with panache and passion.
It is the story of Agnes, motherless daughter of an English priest living in ninth century Europe. Sitting under her father’s table as he discusses and argues theology and philosophy, Agnes’ knowledge and intellect swells. She feasts on facts and theories like a thirsty horse at a stream and at an early age can hold her own with any man in discourse and debate.
Piety, curiosity and a sharp reasoning combine and conflict in Agnes. At quite an early age, it is a puzzle to her that God would destroy an oak to show his power when already he had shown much greater power by making the tree and all around it.
Conflict comes in the carnal form a brilliant Benedictine monk. Enamoured by her scholarship initially, physical attraction tempts his vows of celibacy. “God has made you male of mind and heart and female of form”, he ejaculates.
There is a consummation of the intellectual and the physical, an experience that bears a coruscating truth: To know what it was for a man to treat her as a person, and in doing so, made it impossible she could ever tolerate anything else again.
Certainly not devoid of physical desire, Agnes is determined to avoid the traditional path of females and enlists her lover to aid in the deceit of her gender so that she may devote herself to study.
She succeeds in securing a place in a monastery where “Day after day after day they are reminded that they must be content with the meanest and worst of everything, call themselves the lowest of the low, take no independent action. It is a revelation that these men struggle and need constant correcting in order to live as women must.”
Apostolic and pragmatic, Agnes takes point from Saint Jerome’s letter to Eustachian – when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, she will cease to be a woman and will be called a man.
The Church in the hands of men is a sad, sad situation. Agnes finds the most famed theological teachers in Rome are more concerned with politics than God, with acquiring power in the earthly church than a place in heaven. A conclave of cardinals in scarlet, the red of wet lips, flushed cheeks, pinched nipples and swollen labia. Yet the idea of a female Pope is a red rag to a Papal bull.
Fearfully and wonderfully made, RAPTURE is simultaneously engaging and rewarding, to be read at the gallop and mulled over for days.
RAPTURE by Emily Maguire is published by Allen & Unwin.
