Fludd by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I, like other reviewers, read Mantel’s Booker-prize winning novels, and was awed by their genius. When browsing my local library, espying a thin tome by Mantel, plucking it up was done automatically. And I was not in the least disappointed. That same mastery of language. That same reverence, disguised as irreverence. Deeply serious, but funny, the way only deeply serious things can be.
As to Fludd himself, the character, well. There’s overt references to angels in the novel, and so I guess we’re supposed to make out that he’s some sort of super natural creature. You know, a very human kind of super natural creature. But I kept seeing demon, not angel. That’s hard to justify, given the way events in the novel play out. So I’ll try to do so in this way: religion is man-made, is a folly of fear, and so, angels and demons are not real. A demon, then, isn’t necessarily the evil being that a religion would have us believe.
Neither would an angel be. But in so far as a religion is not real, it nevertheless is structured by very real emotions in our hearts (and spleens). Angels are messengers, demons are seducers. And there it is, Fludd the seducer, the facilitator of emancipation from the outright silliness of religion.
Specifically, Catholicism. Every time I read a book with Catholics in it, it’s either reverential, and has almost no information, or it’s caustically critical, and rife with absurdity. I find it hard to believe that intelligent human beings actually believe this stuff. But they do, and they let it rule their souls, and mire them in misery, and any angel sent to free someone from such misery must, by the rules of the structures of that fake religion, come formed as a demon.
So that’s what I got from Fludd. But you can probably tell I’m anti-church as it is. Fludd preaching to the choir, then.