The Voyage of the Short Serpent
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
The time is the Middle Ages, the place is Greenland. Inquisitor Montanus has been assigned to reclaim the lost colony of New Thule for the Catholic Church. Perched on the top of the world, New Thule has strayed from the straight and narrow. Sodomy and bigamy, Montanus learns, are widespread; so, horrifically, are incest and cannibalism. Told in an elegant, compulsive and increasingly unhinged style, Bernard du Boucheron's The Voyage of the Short Serpent is a masterpiece about human morality in inhuman conditions – a parable about truth, obsession and the myth of Utopia.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A first-time novelist at 76, du Boucheron caused a literary sensation in France with this tale of a bishop's attempted reclamation of a medieval Scandinavian colony in Iceland. As the novel opens, Einar Sokkason, cardinal of Nidaros, learns that the Christian colony of New Thule has turned pagan. He dispatches Inquisitor Ordinary Bishop Insulomontanus to exorcise the colony with the aid of "the stake, the wheel, the head vise, drawing and quartering, the slow hanging, and suspension from the feet or carnal parts." The bishop sets off peaceably in the company of the captain and crew of the Short Serpent, but as the Northern Sea freezes over, frostbite necessitates a few impromptu amputations. This turns out to be a prelude for what will come as the Serpent finally wends its way up the coast of the fjord, and the bishop is greeted by the curious colony of cannibals. Despite a competent translation, the cardinal and bishop's grave dictums are stilted, and the blood and gore titillate less than they bore.
