Hammed: A tale of the crusades; arranged from the memoirs of a warrior-monk by Francois Le Fere, Frank Stiles Le Fevre
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Overview: This remarkable work is a historical novel set in 14th-century Palestine and France, but beneath that lurks a unique Gothic extravaganza whose central theme is sex in a wide variety of manifestations: rapine, voyeuristic, incestuous, adulterous, premarital, polygamous, polyandrous, lesbian, clerical, as well as spoken, written and imagined versions of all these — not to mention those things often associated with sex: lust, passion, love, affection, generosity, jealousy and marriage. Most remarkably, however, the result is not pornography. This is a serious novel with an intricate and well-constructed plot; a good feel for the spirit of its medieval setting; a heavy, rhythmic diction; rounded characters; and thematic attitudes that are unusual for its time, if not for this one as well. There are no anatomical close-ups here, nor any of the flouncing diction of Victorian pornography. The author’s intention is clearly to depict the sexual excitement of the characters rather than to arouse that of the readers. Still, it is evident that any publisher of this book would have been prosecuted for obscenity at the time — or indeed at any time up until the 1960s. If this threat were not enough to scare off a commercial publisher, then the book’s heavy Gothic sensibility would have sealed its doom. The author’s writing ability (within the parameters of his chosen aims) is not the problem. The book was, in a sense, both a century behind the times and a half-century ahead of them. Scenes of extravagant horror compete with those of carnal passion. Parched soldiers on the battlefield in Palestine drink the blood of the slain. In a castle dungeon in France, a murdered villain (Coeur de Fer) is lashed to the body of an unfaithful Countess; she wakes up ravenously hungry and starts to eat the corpse of her former lover but vomits because his flesh has begun to rot. More blood is destined to be spilled in various cascades of jealousy and revenge. Blood spills in the tale almost as freely as sexual fluids. Any plot summary would be inadequate; the labyrinthine complexity of the plot helps to confirm its spirit as Gothic. The most extraordinary thing about the torrents of sexual pleasure coursing around the six main characters is that they are presented as innocent, wholesome, beautiful, generous, loving and, in fact, holy: an expression of God-like delight in the crowning expression of God’s own loving creation. There is no sniggering or titillating. A foil for this banquet of passion is presented by the Countess, Coeur de Fer and the Bishop, whose copulations are coarse, barren, loveless, and dull: the sexual equivalent of hastily gobbled fast food. The novel has perhaps just enough traces of the fantastic (premonitions, secret poisons, mesmerism, a rationalized ghost, blood drinking and flesh eating, as well as a full-blooded Gothic atmosphere) to qualify it as fantastic
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
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