The Times Literary Supplement, 9 May 2003:
No Logo Reformation
Bharat
Tandon
Q
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
635pp. Heinemann, £. 14.99.
0 434 01000 6
"You see, Charles V and the princes are a class of parasites who produce
nothing, but have a huge need to squander money: wars, courts, concubines,
children, tournaments, embassies... The only way they have to pay off the
debts they contract with the bankers is to grant them concessions, to allow
them the usufruct of mines, factories, lands, whole regions. In this way the
bankers are always getting richer and the powerful are becoming more and more
dependent on their money. It's a vicious circle."
So muses the sixteenth-century Antwerp radical Eloi, near the textual and
chronological heart of Q; and the thinly veiled historical parallel
typifies much of what this massive, complex guerrilla novel is engaged in
analysing. The product of four members of the Italian collective which appropriated
the name of the footballing legend Luther Blissett, Q, which was first
published in Italy in 1999, attempts a mud-spattered, paranoid reconstruction
of the long aftermath of Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, with ecclesiastical
spies and soldiers pitted against Anabaptist subversives in various locations
around the Holy Roman Empire. At the same time, the novel offers a long allegory
about the alternative ideological possibilities of history - the Reformation
revisited for the "No Logo" generation. The publishers have billed
Q as both "thriller" and "novel of ideas"; over
the book's length, however, its different generic priorities sometimes pull
too far in conflicting directions.
As the novel's author notes point out, the real Luther Blissett "had
nothing to do with the writing of this book" (although readers buying
Q by mistake may still delight in some accidental football-related
felicities, such as the European ambitions of "the Fuggers"); the
authorial disclaimer, in conjunction with the note permitting electronic reproduction
of the book "for non-commercial purposes", provides a paratextual
framework that primes a modern reader for many of the novel's sixteenth-century
concerns. After all, one of the distinctive features of the Reformation was
the use of printing technology, mechanical reproduction, and the anonymous
proliferation and dissemination of texts in order to promulgate ideas - a
feature qhich, for the Blissett collective, finds a modern analogue in cyberspace.
Aptly enough, therefore, much of Q's plot hinges on forbidden texts,
and the evasion (or punitive imposition) of responsibility for them. Starting
a few months after Luther has nailed the Theses to the door of Wittenberg
Castle, the plot unfolds in a series of nested flashbacks, taking in letters,
diaries and oral testimonies, and oscillating in perspective between two narrators
of uncertain identity: a travelling Anabaptist sometimes known as "Gert
from the Well", and Q, a shadowy Papal spy who tracks the progress of
heresy.
The testimonies of these nameless or many-named figures offer the authors
a window onto the huge, brutal conflicts as this long game of cat-and-mouse
moves over the years, including the vividly imagined conflict at Münster
in 1534 (as Q describes it, "this city's danse macabre catches
all of us in its whirl, like a pestiferous contagion, as though the smell
of the corpses were turning even the living into corpses").
Gert's early conversion to the Anabaptist cause is primarily a matter of theology,
but as the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly clear, to him and the
reader, that theological controversy is inextricably entwined with and conditioned
by the interests of commerce, with the squabbling Church and Imperial authorities
both party in the pockets of the banks. It is here that Q emerges as
part of a tradition of modern historical fiction, which includes works like
The Name of the Rose (to which this novel has been compared by European
critics), and even more pertinently, Thomas Pynchon's Vineland and
Mason and Dixon, which use their historical perspectives to uncover
lost or repressed alternative ideologies from the past - as, for example,
in Vineland's recurring memories of organized labour in America. Q,
for its part, offers Gert's adventures as an early form of "direct action",
as the Fugger Bank's credit is almost undermined by forgery; but it is action
subject to violent institutional reaction, recounted in a catalogue of brutality
which resembles Foucault's Pendulum rewritten by Michel Foucault. Eventually,
the novel's denouement depends on a dangerous text. The Benefit of Christ
Crucified, which may potentially short-circuit the hold of the bankers,
and which also draws Gert and Q into a show-down - one which reveals their
common enemy ("I'm the only one who knows the whole story from the beginning:
Carafa can't risk keeping me in circulation").
Neither does Gert have that much to look forward to: he may escape to Instanbul,
but in a sly parting joke, the seeds of globalization yet to come are ominously
and ironically present in "a little bag of green beans" ("You
roast them and grind them to powder, and they're ready to infuse in boiling
water. They'll go crazy for it in Europe").
Much has been made in Europe of the sheer scale of Q's historical imagination,
and this is undeniably impressive, but the novel is also vulnerable to some
of the occupation hazards which beset all historical fiction - not least,
the question of how render archaic colloqualism convincingly. George Eliot
had to face this problem, not always successfully, when re-imagining Savonarola's
Florence in Romola ("A bad Easter and a bad year to you, and may
you die by the sword!"); Shaun Whiteside's English translation of Q,
likewise, strives bravely to capture the novel's peculiar mixture of the sacred
and the profane, without reducing it to an Anabaptist Mockney, but it sill
comes up at times with lines of cumbersome exposition ("You mean that
Mülhausen, the town that gave an example to all the cities in Thuringia,
is going to stand and watch in the crucial battle for the liberation of the
lands from the Bavarian Alps to Saxony?"). Gert's portion of the narrative,
in particular, is also given to terse, heavily stressed, one-line paragraphs
("Yellow lights pierce the gloom of early morning. / Day of Resurrection").
In writers like James Ellroy of Chuck Palahniul, such staccato effects form
part of the visceral texture; over 600 pages, Q's rhythmic punches
end up aiming too predictably for the same spots. The comparison with The
Name of the Rose also has its limits. Eco's novel smartly pins its theological
and semiological inquiries on an old-fashioned detective plot, a quest, however
delusive, for a centre and an explanation; for all its references to "a
dangerous book; an imminent council; a very powerful man; the most secret
servant", Q's narrative mode is primarily a centrifugal one (as
befits a novel about the distribution of texts), one which follows the logic
of information percolating outwards, like the moder phenomenon of Internet
message-strings. As a result, the thriller plot only gets going after about
250 pages, and is so distended over the book's length that a reader may be
distracted from Q's analyses on corruption by the wequivalent of a
sound playing too slowly in the background.
"We plough our way through the twists and turns of history", remarks
Q. "We are shadows unmentioned in the chronicles. We don't exist."
Q's strength is the intensity with which it can re-imagine such "shadows",
rather than its status as "historical thriller"; it may also have
more in common with Watford FC's Luther Blissett than initially meets the
eye. Both are most effective in the last third; but where Q is best
at set pieces, when it comes to moments of sheer inspiration, the original
Luther Blissett still has the edge.
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