Keith Roberts's Pavane is not shy about its premise: rather than gradually doling out the details of its alternate history, it baldfacedly begins with a prologue describing the assassination of England's Queen Elizabeth I and the subsequent victory of the Spanish Armada. With Spain's domination over Europe complete, there begins a centuries-long global rule by the Catholic Church--one that extends into this alternate world's twentiety century.

A pavane is a piece of music made for a slow and stately dance. Pavane keeps with this musical theme by dividing its fractured narrative into six "measures," each one a short story in its own right set in Roberts's alternate history. Some of the stories feature common characters, though they are often separated by decades; others feature unique characters whose stories--some tragic, some triumphant--give some hints of the larger world in which Roberts's novel takes place.

The first story, "The Lady Margaret," describes a lengthy haul by a young man, Jesse Strange, who must pull a shipment of cargo across the country--with a coal-burning train. Internal combustion engines have already been invented, but the Catholic Church's tight control over technology has prevented such engines (as well as electricity, telecommunications, and other technology) from being used. The Church also restricts social mobility in order to prevent unrest and preserve hierarchy, and it has preserved the centuries-old Inquisition, now run by a mad priest from Rome. The defeat of the English by the Spanish Armada, in short, has led to a feudal society persisting under the tyranny of the Church well into the twentieth century--requiring young men with love in their hearts to haul cargo shipments throughout the freezing night behind the stinking flames of their engines.

Pavane is very strange, and hard to place. Although it is an alternate history novel, its chief concern is not in fact with its alternate world; details of that world are therefore slim compared to the attention Roberts lavishes on his characters and their everyday concerns, many of which (love, work, and a desire to be free) have nothing to do with the fact that the Catholic Church now has dominion over every aspect of people's lives. This is especially true for the first story, "The Lady Margaret," which effectively conveys the bitter cold of the all-night haul that young Jesse Strange pulls, and his heartbreak--and heartbreak again--over the course of the story.

Pervading all of the "measures" in Pavane is an abiding strangeness, a dream-like and perhaps bewitching character to even the most mundane proceedings. This feature first becomes apparent at the end of "The Signaller," which describes the life of a young boy who pursues his dream of operating one of the serial signalling posts that take the place of telecommunications, but the most dream-like story in the collection is "The White Boat," a very weird story that is difficult to understand--both in itself and in its relationship to the rest of the book--but that seems to represent a narrow example of technology smuggling against the Church's will.

The two finest stories in the book by far are "Brother John," about an earnest young monk's initiation into the horrors of the Inquisition, and his unwitting instigation of a rebellion, and "Corfe Gate," describing in taut, tense detail the ultimate result of Brother John's manic grass roots movement. In these chapters Roberts effectively conveys the growing pressure imposed by the Church on its followers, and their inevitable relief at fighting back.

Although Pavane is enjoyable as a whole, at times its attempts at mystery and mysticism (particularly in "The White Boat") become overwhelming, and threaten to undermine the cohesion of the novel as a whole. Its structure also hurts its overall effect: while Roberts does a nice job writing interlocking stories, they're still just stories vaguely connected to one another, rather than a single narrative that gradually accretes tension and plotlines to some rousing conclusion. Finally, although the "Coda" chapter provides some much-needed closure to the novel, it does so with an expository splurge that completely transforms one's view of the novel--and not necessarily in a good way. In a sense the Coda causes you to question whether the novel is properly classified as alternate history at all, or whether it is, instead, some future history, with traces of a fantasy past. Fortunately the ending does not cause you to reinterpret everything you've just read, but it certainly causes you to feel that the novel is both more strange (much more strange) and, paradoxically, more cliched than you thought it was.

I should also mention one final problem I had with Pavane. The Coda notwithstanding, the novel has a whole has a vague implicit message of Protestant and, in particular, English superiority over Catholicism and the Continent. The implication throughout the novel (at least until the Coda--believe me when I say that it introduces a very bizarre idea) is that the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the rise of Protestantism in our world was a good thing, and that if Catholicism had prevailed, then the Church would have kept mankind in the Dark Ages for centuries longer than necessary (in addition to continuining the Inquisition). This strikes me as a little extreme. It would be a little as though somebody wrote a novel positing that the slaves effectively rebelled in the United States during the early nineteenth century and developed an America of poverty, drugs, and homicides. At times Pavane does lean dangerously close to a smear on Catholicism and the European Continent--although, to be fair, Roberts also depicts the residents of his alternate history as generally happy at their lot, or at least as happy as anybody else would be.

Despite my worries, Pavane is still a highly entertaining (if brief) novel. It also has historical importance as one of the seminal alternate history novels in the world of speculative fiction. Whether for fun or for study, Pavane is worth your time.

Copyright © 2003 Steven Wu