Through Darkest Europe by Harry Turtledove
Cover art by Jamie Stafford-Hill
Published by Tor Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
How would it feel like if it happened to you? That question is often posed to small children in the process of teaching them compassion and the skill of thinking through the consequences of their actions.
It's also the foundation of the literary technique of inversion, sometimes called satire by inversion, in which an author criticizes one or another flaw of society by turning the situation upside down. The person or group who are usually in a position of advantage are placed at a disadvantage, the strong becomes the weak, the bully becomes the victim.
Needless to say, it's a very tricky literary device to use well. A clumsy or excessively heavy-handed execution can actually come across as an attack on the very people whose suffering the author had intended to highlight, as witness the controversial Farnham's Freehold, which more than a few critics have used as evidence that Robert A. Heinlein was a racist of the vilest sort, never mind the evidence of such novels as The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress or Starship Troopers, with their multi-racial and integrated casts.
So when I discovered this novel on the shelves of our local public library and read the blurb, I was more than a little concerned. Harry Turtledove has built a strong reputation on his depth of writing, and particularly his talent for getting into the characters of the ordinary people of a variety of cultures, from a Chinese woman having agency in her life for the first time in the hands of alien captors to Blacks struggling to escape extermination camps in a South that's pursuing its own Final Solution. But he's also written a few novels that I'd eagerly anticipated, only to discover when I began reading that I just didn't care about any of the characters, and found it easier to take the book back to the library at the end of the loan period rather than renew it and try to engage with it enough to read through to the end.
That said, I was reasonably confident that he would be able to handle the subject with deftness and sensitivity. Unlike Heinlein, Turtledove is not one to resort to the hammer of didacticism, and tends to leave moral lessons (like "do as you would be done by") implicit in the consequences of the characters' actions.
The novel begins aboard an airliner from Tunis to Rome, where we meet Khalid al-Zarzisi, an experienced investigator on his way to a very special mission, as he tries to remember Homer's expression for the deep blue color of the sea. He is accompanied by his partner, Dawud ibn Musa, who is Jewish and at first encounter seems to be a figure of comic relief. Unlike his impeccably dressed boss, Dawud is something of a slob, and seems to be constantly joking.
In these few pages, we're quickly oriented into this alternate world, where Muslims are worldly and many no longer take the Koranic prohibition against intoxicating drink seriously, although some drink specifically because wine is haram, forbidden. A world where Christians were once routinely portrayed as drunkards in movies, although that is now considered an offensive stereotype -- and our protagonist bemoans the spread of political correctness, even if he doesn't use that term.
There are bits of fish-out-of-water amusement as they arrive and see the Roman alphabet as something that runs backward (since they are accustomed to the Arabic script, which runs from right to left), as well as hints that all is not well when a Christian woman crosses herself in relief at having landed safely and our protagonist finds obvious piety unsettling. And then they run headfirst into the open and explicit anti-Semitism of the Italians, who blame the entire Jewish people for the crucifixion of Jesus. Khalid acknowledges the soft anti-Semitism of his own people, among whom a Jewish person must be twice as good to rise half as far.
And then they meet a representative of the Italian Ministry of Information, which will be their primary contact while they are in Italy. In the process, they see for the first time the Aquinist Seminary, the fortress-like headquarters of a religious order that takes the notion of the Church Militant very seriously.
Now at last we learn the critical point of divergence. In our world, St. Thomas Aquinas reconciled Aristotle (and by extension, Classical Greek philosophy in general) with the Bible and the teachings of the Catholic Church, while the Muslim philosopher al-Ghazali rejected rational natural philosophy as either contradictory to Allah and the Koran, and thus blasphemous, or as superfluous if it agreed. As a result, Western Europe was put on the path to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, while the Islamic world turned its back on the sciences and became trapped in superstition and backwardness until modernity came calling in the form of oil wealth.
In the world of this novel, Aquinas rejected Aristotle as drawing people away from Christ, and thus to embrace a sinful world and try to make it comfortable and pleasant instead of doing one's utmost to be pleasing unto God, while al-Ghazali was the one who reconciled reason and revelation and opened the doors to modernity. It is the Muslim world which has taken the lead in technology and culture, and by and large other cultures seek to imitate their manner of dress, their way of building, and even their manner of speaking. Classical Arabic, the language of the Koran, is the international language everyone learns to communicate beyond the borders of one's own land. And while the Romans live amidst the ruins of a culture far more ancient than Islam or even Christianity, most of them know little of the culture of the builders of those monuments (rather like Egyptians and Iraqis in our own world). The Pantheon, once dedicated to all the gods of pagan Rome, is now a Christian church, and most people either don't know or don't care that the sacrifice of the Mass was not the original sacrifice offered on its altar.
After a visit to Pope Marcellus, who is trying to enact some reforms, but has to watch his back lest the Aquinists decide he is a heretic and antipope, our protagonists finally get to visit the Aquinist Seminary and meet its Corrector, as its leader is styled. And here's when I'm starting to get really puzzled about exactly what era this novel is set in.
Up to this point, I'd assumed that it was a roughly contemporary setting. There's the modern airliners, and the references to Khalid having met a Turk who'd walked on the Moon, in a way that suggested the lunar landings were something over and done with, rather like the Apollo lunar landings in this world. And then we are introduced to Father Domenico Pacelli, and as he's described, I'm thinking this has to be the same Father Pacelli who became Pope Pius XII, beloved of radical traditionalists and regarded by many of them as the last true Pope. So is this a contemporary setting, as the technology suggests, or is it actually something more like the 1930's and 1940's?
However, our protagonists have no sooner gotten back to their hotel from the uncomfortable meeting with the Corrector of the Roman Aquinist Seminary that they receive an invitation to a reception in the palace of the Grand Duke of Italy, Cosimo III. Here again we get that weird sense of time out of joint -- if Pacelli gives us the sense of the 1940's, Cosimo's name makes us think of the Medicis and the Renaissance.
One thing's for certain -- this man is very aware that being known as a reformer and a modernizer places him at considerable risk. His palace is more like a fortress, built partially into the Roman hillside to better defend it. Security is tight, perhaps even tighter than what the Aquinists maintain at their seminary. But as it turns out, nothing can completely protect him. It's an inside job, a beautiful woman who is in fact a fanatic, slipped into the staff for the night's festivities, such that she can get sufficiently close to to Cosimo and set off the explosives she is wearing.
Now the reformer Grand Duke is dead and Italy is in the hands of his much younger son Lorenzo. And there's a state funeral to be prepared, something that is a disturbing shock to Muslims and Jews, who are accustomed to burying their dead before the sun sets if at all possible.
Hoping for a quiet funeral, Lorenzo cracks down on the Aquinists and takes Corrector Pacelli prisoner, having him march in the funeral procession on the way to the Pantheon, where the late Grand Duke's requiem Mass will be celebrated. Except the procession is attacked, and amidst the mass casualty incident, Pacelli is killed, whether by Aquinist terrorists or by the Grand Duke's guards, no one knows. The Pantheon is destroyed by a time bomb, leading young Lorenzo to order the Aquinist order dissolved and the Roman seminary completely searched by security forces -- only to have yet another bomb turn up inside it, killing many of the Grand Duke's best investigators.
Thus begins a period of continual, relentless terrorism -- truck bombs, car bombs, pedestrian bombs, you name it, it's going boom and causing mass destruction. Our protagonists take a trip to Florence, only to have the Ministry of Information building attacked by Aquinist terrorists, some of which are clearly not Italian, but coming from lands further north, particularly the German kingdoms, duchies and principalities. Still shaken from that, they head down to Naples, and take a look at an international archeological dig at Pompeii.
Amidst all this relentless horror, we have an interesting little character bit in an announcement by the Corrector of the Aquinist Seminary in Munich, one Father Adolphus. If Father Domenico Pacelli of the Roman Aquinist Seminary is that timeline's equivalent to Pope Pius XII, could this character be that timeline's version of a certain infamous Austrian? Except if he is a senior member of the Aquinist order, why would he have kept his baptismal name, rather than taking a religious name with his final vows, as is a common practice among the Regular Dominicans? Still, it's interesting to imagine the Failed Painter clean-shaven, tonsured, and wearing the habit of an order of the consecrated life.
The rest of the novel is more and more horrific sectarian violence, in which our protagonists desperately try to help the wounded. There's a point where it starts getting repetitive, which becomes a real problem, because even monstrous evil can come to bore a reader if It keeps happening. However, for an author to just keep ratcheting up the level of cruelty in order to keep shocking the reader runs the risk of becoming terrorism porn. Quite honestly, I'm not really sure how to fix this last part of the novel. Perhaps punch up the romantic subplot that's developed between Khalid and the late Grand Duke's former administrative assistant, so there's a different kind of tension to hold the reader's attention without needing to go for cheap shocks?
In the end, the protagonists return home to a somewhat bittersweet ending. Some personal happiness has been attained, but the fundamental problems of their world remain with no resolution in sight, for the simple reason that religious fanatics are unlikely to change their ways. As C.S. Lewis once commented, the tyrant's lust for power may be sated, as may the greed of the robber baron, but the man who believes he is doing this for your own good does not sleep.
While I found it a fascinating parable about the importance of being able to reconcile reason and revelation, I keep wondering if it's a world that could actually have come to be. Could Islamic thinkers have found a way to reconcile reason and revelation and open the doors to modernity rather than having it thrust upon them? And even if they could have, would it have been able to make enough of a change in the other problems in the culture of the heart of Islam to make the development of a modern society possible?
There is strong evidence that other dysfunctions in Arab culture would still hold it back from being able to develop an advanced technological society, even if early Muslim thinkers had embraced Aristotle and reconciled Greek philosophy with the Koran. One of the biggest dysfunctions that Arab culture struggles with is a persistent tendency toward amoral familialism (Me against my brother. Me and my brother against my cousin. Me, my brother and my cousin against the world -- a system that was first identified in southern Italy, a Christian culture, by anthropologists who wondered why Sicily and the southern part of the peninsula were so poor in comparison to Milan and other cities of the north). This social pattern leads to low-trust societies that struggle to build social capital. In fact, there's been some theorizing that Islam developed as an effort to address this issue, but by making its holy writ not open to reinterpretation, made it impossible to adapt to modernity.
Buy Through Darkest Europe from Amazon.com
Review posted April 12, 2012.
