TITLE: The Leviathan
AUTHOR: Rosie Andrews
PUBLISHER: Raven Books
ISBN: 978-1526637338
PODCAST EPISODE: Coming soon
REVIEWER: Tim Rideout
‘She is awake. And I must remind myself of how it began. The end of all things. It was a time of witches, it was a time of saints, a time when rabbits hunted foxes, when children came into the world without their heads, and kings lost theirs on the scaffold. The world was turned upside down, or so some said.’
In 1703, the elderly Thomas Treadwater reflects on the past. Sixty years earlier, Thomas had been a reluctant participant in the English Civil War, fighting for the Parliamentary cause against King Charles I’s forces. At his sister Esther’s request, Thomas returns to his family home in Norfolk. Esther has accused a servant, Chrissa Moore, of improper conduct with their father. Upon his arrival, Thomas finds his father incapacitated and Chrissa Moore imprisoned on charges of witchcraft. Thus begins Thomas’s descent into a bewildering miasma of superstition, ancient forces and family secrets, experiences that will shape the rest of his life.
The Leviathan is a rich, beguiling and atmospheric novel, characteristics signalled from the outset by the novel’s title. In Biblical terms, a leviathan is a monster of the waters. Initially in turn a crocodile, serpent and whale, the term came to represent any huge sea creature or ship. Whilst Andrews makes use of both sea creature and ship, it is also of direct relevance to the novel that, according to rabbinical tradition, it was Leviathan who seduced Eve in its male incarnation of Samael and Adam in its female incarnation of Lilith. (1) The title also evokes Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), his treatise on ‘the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil’, equating the great power of the Government or the State to that of the biblical sea monster. In Andrews’ novel power in its various forms (familial, patriarchal, judicial, governmental and judicial) is at play.
Notwithstanding The Leviathan’s supernatural elements, the novel is grounded in a nuanced and empathetic understanding of the period. This is particularly the case in the novel’s treatment of that society’s response to a charge of witchcraft. Eschewing popular imagery of torture and immediate execution, Chrissa Moore’s is subject to a legal complexity and judicial process that adds to the realism of Andrews’ depiction of the seventeenth century. Such care is evident in the construction of the character of Magistrate Manyon, a man motivated by the worldly considerations of power, status and personal desire.
In addition, the verisimilitude of the narrative is strengthened by Andrews’ introduction of her own fictionalised version of the poet John Milton, alluding to Milton’s own engagement with ‘a world turned upside down’ and the development of seventeenth-century counter-culture attributed to the religio-political ideas of the left-wing of English Puritanism embodied by figures like Milton and John Bunyan. In keeping with The Leviathan’s literary Gothic roots, the period depicted is one of political and religious turmoil, as age-old certainties are stripped away. Whilst the English Civil War predates the historical origins of the Gothic literary form, Andrews’ use of the mode is entirely apt, as fear and anxiety define the historical period in question.
Indeed, this is a novel in which time is out of joint. The Leviathan begins with Thomas Treadwater reflecting upon the events of 1643 from the vantage point of 1703. However a more complex preoccupation with time is at play in the novel. The source of the supernatural force is ancient, Lovecraftian in its form, evoking notions of mythic deep time. Such a cosmic force is not limited to the present day of the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, but foresees the ‘world’s ending in fire and ice’ as ‘Chaos reigns once again, and the march of time has begun anew’. The unease and dread that pervades the novel’s contemporaneous events is underpinned by an existential anxiety, the fear is transcendent and all the more effective for it. As a consequence, The Leviathan offers us both an understanding of the historical period portrayed and an evocation of our current political and social context, as all great historical fiction does.
(1) Susie Dent, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable 19th Edition (Chambers Harrap, London: 2012), pp. 788-789.
AUTHOR: Rosie Andrews
PUBLISHER: Raven Books
ISBN: 978-1526637338
PODCAST EPISODE: Coming soon
REVIEWER: Tim Rideout
‘She is awake. And I must remind myself of how it began. The end of all things. It was a time of witches, it was a time of saints, a time when rabbits hunted foxes, when children came into the world without their heads, and kings lost theirs on the scaffold. The world was turned upside down, or so some said.’
In 1703, the elderly Thomas Treadwater reflects on the past. Sixty years earlier, Thomas had been a reluctant participant in the English Civil War, fighting for the Parliamentary cause against King Charles I’s forces. At his sister Esther’s request, Thomas returns to his family home in Norfolk. Esther has accused a servant, Chrissa Moore, of improper conduct with their father. Upon his arrival, Thomas finds his father incapacitated and Chrissa Moore imprisoned on charges of witchcraft. Thus begins Thomas’s descent into a bewildering miasma of superstition, ancient forces and family secrets, experiences that will shape the rest of his life.
The Leviathan is a rich, beguiling and atmospheric novel, characteristics signalled from the outset by the novel’s title. In Biblical terms, a leviathan is a monster of the waters. Initially in turn a crocodile, serpent and whale, the term came to represent any huge sea creature or ship. Whilst Andrews makes use of both sea creature and ship, it is also of direct relevance to the novel that, according to rabbinical tradition, it was Leviathan who seduced Eve in its male incarnation of Samael and Adam in its female incarnation of Lilith. (1) The title also evokes Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), his treatise on ‘the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil’, equating the great power of the Government or the State to that of the biblical sea monster. In Andrews’ novel power in its various forms (familial, patriarchal, judicial, governmental and judicial) is at play.
Notwithstanding The Leviathan’s supernatural elements, the novel is grounded in a nuanced and empathetic understanding of the period. This is particularly the case in the novel’s treatment of that society’s response to a charge of witchcraft. Eschewing popular imagery of torture and immediate execution, Chrissa Moore’s is subject to a legal complexity and judicial process that adds to the realism of Andrews’ depiction of the seventeenth century. Such care is evident in the construction of the character of Magistrate Manyon, a man motivated by the worldly considerations of power, status and personal desire.
In addition, the verisimilitude of the narrative is strengthened by Andrews’ introduction of her own fictionalised version of the poet John Milton, alluding to Milton’s own engagement with ‘a world turned upside down’ and the development of seventeenth-century counter-culture attributed to the religio-political ideas of the left-wing of English Puritanism embodied by figures like Milton and John Bunyan. In keeping with The Leviathan’s literary Gothic roots, the period depicted is one of political and religious turmoil, as age-old certainties are stripped away. Whilst the English Civil War predates the historical origins of the Gothic literary form, Andrews’ use of the mode is entirely apt, as fear and anxiety define the historical period in question.
Indeed, this is a novel in which time is out of joint. The Leviathan begins with Thomas Treadwater reflecting upon the events of 1643 from the vantage point of 1703. However a more complex preoccupation with time is at play in the novel. The source of the supernatural force is ancient, Lovecraftian in its form, evoking notions of mythic deep time. Such a cosmic force is not limited to the present day of the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, but foresees the ‘world’s ending in fire and ice’ as ‘Chaos reigns once again, and the march of time has begun anew’. The unease and dread that pervades the novel’s contemporaneous events is underpinned by an existential anxiety, the fear is transcendent and all the more effective for it. As a consequence, The Leviathan offers us both an understanding of the historical period portrayed and an evocation of our current political and social context, as all great historical fiction does.
(1) Susie Dent, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable 19th Edition (Chambers Harrap, London: 2012), pp. 788-789.