Holy Fools
by Joanne Harris
Doubleday £15, pp430
It is 1610. Juliette, the daughter of gypsies, is an actress and tightrope walker. She tours Europe with a troupe of players until the group is scattered in a hysterical confrontation one sweltering day in the plague- ridden town of Epinal. Pregnant and broke, she has but one choice - the convent, at first welcoming and tolerant of her daughter until the arrival of a zealous new mother superior.
The themes are very much Harris's favourites: the setting is France, the main character a single mother of a daughter whose father is a mercurial rogue, and the principal outside threat is the church, although food takes a back seat. The narrative is a first-person diary, spanning a year with flashbacks cutting between Juliette and her ex-lover, Guy LeMerle. The clue as to whose is the current voice is the card symbol at the top of the entry - a heart for her, a spade for him.
This is a hugely enjoyable book - for me, more so than Chocolat. Harris writes with fluidity and confidence, vividly portraying the vicious life of the poor in provincial seventeenth-century France: the disease, vermin, cold and the cut-throat tenacity needed to survive. The dark treatment of travelling players put me in mind of Barry Unsworth's Morality Play.
Harris subtly highlights the hubris of the church, preaching morality but practising less Christian values than the gypsies. The similarities between the players and the nuns become more apparent as the novel unfolds: the emphasis on ritual and performance, the tightknit communities of disparate souls thrown randomly together.
When Juliette first arrives at the convent, the rule of the kindly old abbess is lax but life is principled. Prayers are infrequent, food plentiful, dress casual, the nuns worship an ancient pagan statue they know as Saint Martie-de-la-Mer, and Juliette is allowed her daughter with her. When draconian Christian rules are applied with the appearance of the new religious zealot, the nuns behave like pagans as survival becomes a matter of deception and sleight of hand, trickery and seduction. As a former convent girl who loathed every second of it, it was horribly familiar.
