It has been a while, I know. :( I didn't intend to keep off blogging for this long but stuff happens, I guess. But I'm back now with another book review. Surprise, surprise! I have to admit that recently I have ordered a lot of books online (around about 20), and a lot of them were by the same authors so I'm afraid my blog will start to look like a shrine. But that doesn't matter. Anyway ... on with the review.
So I read Changeling by Philippa Gregory. It is part of a trilogy called the Order of Darkness trilogy. I have to say that I was a little tentative about reading it, simply because I LOVE Philippa Gregory's books on the Tudor and Plantagenet periods and I was worried that it might not live up to my expectations. I was completely wrong about that. Changeling is set in the 1400s and tells the story about a boy called Luca Vero, who has to travel across the country, finding about what makes people scared. This is at a time when people are scared about the end of the world. There was a great fear of witchcraft and of the Devil possessing people and religion was used as a means of controlling the common people and getting them to do things. Luca travels to a convent where the nuns believe that they have been possessed and Luca has to find out what is going on.
Some themes in the book...
I think I have already done an overall theme about religion when talking about Purple Hibiscus so I won't talk about that again. Instead, I am going to talk about fear and ignorance and the role that they play in society and control. It is a really important part of the book. The nuns in the convent are scared that the Devil has come among them and is possessing the sisters. The people in the village are scared of the werewolf. A generalisation is that people are scared about things that they don't understand or can't make sense of. One of the characters is a Muslim, in a time when Muslims were seen as heretics and pagans and Islam was very 'dangerous' because it threatened the spread of Christianity in Europe and into the Middle East. It is clear that because they don't understand her beliefs and who she is, they associate everything else that they fear with her. Not only that, but they are encouraged to do so by the bishops and the lords and those people in charge who are also scared about things that they don't understand. And now, in this day and age, although I would like to think that we don't fear so much Satan walking among us, we do have a tendency to avoid or be afraid of what we don't understand. Fear is a perfectly natural reaction to things but, as a race, we sometimes take it out of context and blow it out of proportion. Racism, particularly in the wake of terrorist attacks, can stem from ignorance which results in fear and aggression. We are scared by what we see , naturally, and we want to understand it, so we blame someone in order to personify our fear and make it seem less scary. We are scared of an apocalyptic cult that wants to destroy the world and so we blame someone innocent to reduce the anonymity of it. Obviously in the past, at the time when this book takes place, the higher, intelligent elite used religion to scare the people into submission. 'Do this or you are going to Hell.' 'Your king has been elected by God and therefore you have to follow him' 'His law is God's law'. But similarly, people didn't understand religion in the way that they perhaps understand it today because many of the religious books were in Latin and/or people couldn't read. So fear of Hell for them was real and therefore, they did as they were told.
Recommendations
The Virgin's Lover by Philippa Gregory
This is an amazing book by the same author about Elizabeth I, her assumed affair with Robert Dudley and the scandal that surrounded the death of his wife Amy Dudley.
Wonder by R.J. Palacio
On the theme of fear in a present day setting, this is a beautiful book about a boy who was born with a facial deformity and has to go to school and face all of the stigmas that are associated with being different.
And that's the end of this post. :) I hope you enjoyed it.
Clare