Divide and Rule

Jan Mark has never been afraid to tackle big issues in her award-winning novels and short story collections. This early novel takes on one of the biggest issues of all, the inherently evil nature of organized religion--- a hard fact citizens of the US currently are having their noses rubbed against almost daily. Mark's protagonist, Hanno, lives in what might well be Middle Earth... clearly England, but in no known time period. The town he lives in is dominated by a huge Temple, which every year choses a young man to be the "Shepherd," a living link between ordinary men and a distant, silent god. Hanno is keeping secret his deteriorating eyesight, by avoiding the family business of pottery and working as a river boatman. Despite his total disbelief in the city's religion, Hanno is chosen as the new Shepherd. Over the next year he is held as a virtual prisoner within the Temple; his health and eyesight deteriorate precipitously, as he is mentally and physically tortured by the Temple guards; and, coincidentally, attendance at the Temple services plummets nearly to zero. There's a harmless lunatic living in the ceremonial space with Hanno, and the mysterious death of the lunatic creates a new religious cult which is immediately incorporated within the Temple's teachings, causing a huge revival of public interest in religion and attendance at Temple services... all according to someone's plan. All truth is in The Book, which sits chained to an immobile lectern by the Temple altar. But Hanno makes a horrifying discovery about this handwritten document... and he also finds evidence that animal sacrifice used to be part of the Temple's ritual... so he begins to wonder if human sacrifices occurred before an animal was substituted. As the Temple rituals begin to change rapidly, to incorporate the lunatic Prophet's supposed future visions and nonexistent "teachings," Hanno justifiably wonders if the end of his year's tenure as Shepherd will end with his own sacrifice! The novel has some defects. Hanno is a bit too helpless and passive to be a truly worthy focus for the reader's attention; and, the core teachings and internal organization of the Temple never really emerge, with even the little that is seen not making much anthropological sense to me, although this is probably a deliberate choice of the author's. My copy of the book is ex-library, and does not appear to have ever been checked out.

This is one of those books that will haunt you forever. It's not exactly a laugh a minute - if you like your fiction up-beat and your endings joyful this is not the book for you. It makes you think, it makes me cry every time I read it. Being by Jan Mark it is, of course, exceptionally well-written - her (pre-industrial) world is totally believable as are the characters. The story concerns Hanno, a thoughtful, gentle, honest and amiable young man of 18 who is an outsider in his town because he doesn't believe in "the god" and choses to ignore the social norms for his class (becoming a boatman rather than taking up a more respectable trade like his brother Ivo). To his shock he is chosen to serve as "The Shepherd" for a year at the temple, acting as the powerless figurehead of the religious rites. However, the devotion of the townspeople is dwindling rapidly and the power-hungry "Dwellers" in the temple decide something must be done... Over the course of the book Hanno becomes more and more the helpless pawn of the temple system and, as the year wears on, he is gradually stripped of everything - right down to his identity. It's a chilling and appalling story and the end left me shaking the first time I read it, but it's also one of the most rewarding books you'll ever come across.