Rebels and Traitors by Lindsey Davis (Century)
Loyal fans of her Roman private eye Falco who pick up Lindsey Davis’s latest novel, Rebels and Traitors, may be disappointed. Trying to lift the book may provide the first shock: at 750 large-format pages, it is weightier in every sense than the Falco tales. Davis has jumped genres, and Rebels and Traitors is an historical epic. It deals not, as the blurb misleadingly proclaims, with the English Civil War, but with something far more interesting: the English Revolution and what historian Christopher Hill called “the revolt within the revolution”.
Hill is the appropriate historian to invoke, because his equally weighty book, The World Turned Upside Down, was the first history to reveal the scale and scope of that revolution, and the consciously subversive ideals of its articulate working-class makers: not merely the abolition of the monarchy but of class distinction, noble and Church privilege, and patriarchy.
Davis’s protagonist, Gideon Jukes, moves from pondering whether some adjustment in the social order might be justified and possible to battling for the gains of what today we’d call the “left” against the betrayals and broken promises of Cromwell’s post-revolutionary regime.
Juliana Lovell marries a Royalist but never quite buys the ideology, and the vagaries of war bring her and Jukes together. These ordinary characters are made all the more human by the caution with which they approach change. Around them, their families and others — including most memorably the destitute girl Kinchin Tew — also find their world turned upside down by both the horrors of civil war and some intoxicating new ideas about social roles.
The book has power for South African readers on two levels. At surface, it’s an exciting saga of love and war, with some compelling characters and a vivid evocation of the look, smell, and even taste of period and place. Davis says she has long wanted to write a book in which her home town of Birmingham featured; this book follows the struggles from London to the revolutionary Midlands and back.
But drop the costumes and backdrops and this is the story of a country torn apart by — and then emerging from — a civil war. The compromises and conservatism of the new government leave war veterans unpaid and neglected. When they protest, they are fired upon. Many of the former ruling class retain their power and privilege because stability is needed and they know how to run things — especially finance. Popular radical commanders are mysteriously assassinated. Women revolutionaries are forced back to husbands and chores; journalists and satirists are ordered to mute their criticisms in the national interest. Some of this may sound familiar.
The discourse that made the Falco books compelling concerned social roles and character formed in a very different society from our own. So it does in Rebels and Traitors. Davis is particularly powerful in portraying women’s experiences: how women become “good” or “bad” and the scope of their choices. Civil war does not simply sweep through and uproot, burn and rape once, but repeatedly, until there is no possibility of rebuilding. That may sound familiar too.
The book has its flaws. Those not fascinated by the minutiae of battle strategy and political faction-fighting may find those sections overlong. The omniscient author’s perspective — a large step away from Falco’s first-person narration — tempts Davis to tell us rather too often: “… and this was to be the origin of …” She seeks a voice in dialogue that is neither archaic nor over-modern; mostly, it works, but occasionally the level of formality produces literally unspeakable sentences.
Historical epics are the only genre novels ever credited as serious enough for Britain’s Booker Prize — even when others such as science fiction and fantasy say more and say it better. Perhaps 2009 Booker winner (for a historical novel) Hilary Mantel had it in mind to protect her turf when she damned Rebels and Traitors as “disappointing and exhausting”. It is neither. This story of ordinary people caught in huge events, determined to win justice and stop leaders selling out, speaks across the centuries. It’s a story we could write — but have not yet fully written — about Khayelitsha, Cradock, and the East Rand.