KNOWLEDGE OF ANGELS by Jill Paton Walsh
It is, perhaps, the fifteenth century and the ordered tranquillity of a Mediterranean island is about to be shattered by the appearance of two outsiders: one, a castaway, plucked from the sea by fishermen, whose beliefs represent a challenge to the established order; the other, a child abandoned by her mother and suckled by wolves, who knows nothing of the precarious relationship between church and state but whose innocence will become the subject of a dangerous experiment.
But the arrival of the Inquisition on the island creates a darker, more threatening force which will transform what has been a philosophical game of chess into a matter of life and death.
Praise for Knowledge of Angels:
"A compelling Mediaeval fable, written from the heart and melded to a driving narrative which never once loses its tremendous impact." The Guardian.
"This remarkable novel resemble an illuminated manuscript mapped with angels and mountains and signposts, an allegory for today and yesterday too. A beautiful, unsettling moral fiction about virtue and intolerance." The Observer.
"The lucidity of Jill Paton Walsh's style and the dexterity of the narrative are such that her book reads more like a good thriller than a weighty novel of ideas...an ingenious fable." The Times.
"An irresistible blend of intellect and passion...novels of ideas come no better than this sensual example." Mail on Sunday.
Notoriously, Knowledge of Angels could not find a publisher in Britain, although it was published successfully in the USA by Peter Davison at Houghton Mifflin. As a last resort, Jill Paton Walsh and John Rowe Townsend published it themselves under the Green Bay imprint, with the help of Colt Books, who on hearing of the plan to publish by importing the US edition, came immediately and gladly to the rescue. Knowledge of Angels was shortlisted for the Booker Prize .
About the origins of KNOWLEDGE OF ANGELS the author writes:
Some twenty years ago I heard a lecture on feral children by Harlan Lane, author of The Wild Boy of Aveyron in which he mentioned the MAID OF CHALONS, who had been found in the French Alps, and confined in a convent while she was taught French by nuns who did not mention God to her, in order to find by questioning her later, whether the knowledge of God is innate. Very struck, I asked Mr. Lane for references. He gave me a citation in Jean-Baptiste Rousseau. I could not find any further information, beyond the brief one in Rousseau, but I was dazzled by the idea of trying to draw a line from a sub-human creature to the divine. The image of this child of the snows shone somewhere in the back of my mind, and there the matter lay for some time.I have always been interested in the logical proofs of the existence of God; I spent hours of my childhood standing in the corridor during religion lessons as a punishment for refusing to find the five proofs of St. Thomas convincing. Although not valid proofs, these are ideas of uncommon beauty. I left the church in early adult life; but one does not `leave' one's education...When the story of the Fatwa on Salman Rushdie broke I was dismayed to read various commentators asserting that Islam was more intolerant than Christianity. These people had short memories. In 1993, on impulse, John Townsend, my companion in life, and I, went for a brief visit to Mallorca, to get away from a dismal English February. As soon as I saw the landscape of Mallorca, the story unrolled itself from the back of my mind, and fitted itself on the landscape like a glove on a hand. It occurred to me, as it should have done sooner, that instead of spending years researching seventeenth century France, and telling a true story, I could extract the essence of the historical incident, and tell it in an imaginary `Mallorca' so that its pungent relevance to the present day would more easily be seen.What sort of thing a society tries to discover from a wild child tells us a lot about the central concerns of that society; Jean-Jaques Rousseau (Second Discours) sought light upon his theory of the noble savage; a contemporary rescued child [vide The New Yorker, April 13th, 1992 et seq] was used to try to confirm modern theories of language acquisition; in the Middle Ages the existence of God would have been the prime concern. By propelling into a medieval country, full of unquestioning faith, both a wild child and an atheist, the book explores the limits of tolerance, and the connection between intolerance and moral certainty, which dogs religious believers, and makes them all too often murderous and cruel. On returning from that one week in Mallorca, I set to work in a frenzy, and wrote Knowledge of Angels in approximately three months. I could think of nothing else. But the answer to `how long have I been working on it?' is, really, all my thinking life.
Knowledge of Angels is a fable; understanding it does not require an independent survey of its many sources, but it makes its own statement and invites your own thought and feeling. However in the face of many requests I offer the following remarks and references: The primary reference is to Epitre II sur l’Homme from the letters of Jean Baptiste Rousseau, ed. Louis Racine. The citation at the front of the novel is intended simply to indicate to the reader that they are reading about something which did really happen.Beneditx’s arguments are the ontological argument formulated by St Anselm and others, and the five “Ways” of St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica question 2, articles 1-3, et passim. Summa Contra Gentiles 1.iii-iv. See also Anthony Kenny The Five WaysThe distinction between morning knowledge and evening knowledge is from St Augustine, Civitate Dei 11.29Palinor’s ideas are very roughly those of Emmanuel Kant. He is named for Palinurus, the pilot of Aeneas.The collision of ideas in the story occurs in the real world not by the incursion of a modern thinker into a mediaeval society but by the survival into the modern world of mediaeval patterns of thought.On feral children the stories are all doubtful. The most useful books are Charles Maclean, The Wolf Children 1978, Harlan Lane op cit., and J.A.L. Singh & Robert M. Zingg’s Wolf Children and Feral Man, 1942.On the exposure of children John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers.There are extensive allusions to The New Testament.On the Inquisition please note that we are concerned with not the Spanish Inquisition, which was always political and under the control of the Spanish Crown, but the mediaeval inquisition, which, whatever you think about it, was concerned with matters of faith, and controlled from Rome.
Jill Paton Walsh was born Gillian Bliss in London on April 29th, 1937.
She was educated at St. Michael's Convent, North Finchley, and at St. Anne's College, Oxford. From 1959 to 1962 she taught English at Enfield Girls' Grammar School. In 1961 she married Anthony Paton Walsh; (now separated); they have one son, and two daughters.
Jill Paton Walsh has won the Book World Festival Award, 1970, for Fireweed; the Whitbread Prize, 1974 (for a Children's novel) for The Emperor's Winding Sheet; The Boston Globe-Horn Book Award 1976 for Unleaving; The Universe Prize, 1984 for A Parcel of Patterns; and the Smarties Grand Prix, 1984, for Gaffer Samson's Luck.
She held an Arts Council Creative Writing Fellowship in 1976-8; was a 'permanent visiting faculty member' of the Centre for Children's Literature, Simmons College, Boston, Massachussetts from 1978 to 1986, was Gertrude Clarke Whittall lecturer at the Library of Congress in 1978, was a Whitbread Prize judge in 1984, was Chairman of the Cambridge Book Association from 1987 to 1989, and has served on the management committee of the Society of Authors. She has contributed articles and reviews to many journals and is currently 'adjunct British board member' of Childrens' Literature New England.
More recently she has written for adults; in 1994 her novel Knowledge of Angels was short-listed for the Booker Prize.
After living for many years in Richmond, Surrey, she is now settled in Cambridge, where in partnership with John Rowe Townsend she runs a small specialist imprint 'Green Bay Publications.'
In 1996 she received the CBE for services to literature, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Clifford Longley ‘No one was ever persuaded that God existed or not by sheer rational argument’ (see article in May issue of "The Tablet" www.thetablet.co.uk)
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