Starred review from November 30, 2020
British filmmaker Hopkins’s ambitious and satisfying debut uses a big story—the century-plus cathedral building project in Hagenburg in the Holy Roman Empire (now Lower Saxony)—to tell an even bigger story—the rise of merchants and the corresponding decline of the church through the 13th century. Characters play roles in the never-ending skirmishes among nobles, burghers, Jews, and the church, but they read like real people. Prominent among them are three siblings: Rettich, who buys his freedom and gets a job helping to build the cathedral; his brother, Emmle, who becomes a Jewish merchant’s gentile right hand; and sister Grete, the ambitious wife of a city trader. Also crucial: Von Rabern, the Bishop’s cranky but honest treasurer; Yudl, a Jewish boy torn between being a scholar or a merchant; and several nobles. What links them all is money, which is loaned, borrowed, stolen, and withheld, as goods, services, and secrets are bought and sold while the cathedral rises or stalls. Six hundred pages sounds long, but this deeply human take on a medieval city and its commerce and aspirations, its violent battles and small intimacies, never feels that way. This sweeping work is as impressive as the cathedral at its center.
Starred review from June 1, 2020
This first novel by screenwriter Hopkins imagines a paean to the glory of God arising from the unholy muck of the Middle Ages. By the year 1229, a lofty Cathedral--a bishop's vanity project, always capitalized--is already in the works in Hagenburg, Germany. The Bishop's treasurer is not enamored of the idea, opining that "a constant river of silver and gold flows into that damned hole, providing the wages of the idle, and paying quarrymen, foresters and glaziers for their so-called labour." The bishop has just "passed into Glory," the Lord Treasurer is abroad, the pope is dead, infidel hordes besiege Jerusalem, and "all is in turmoil and flux." No wonder the Cathedral takes so long to build. Meanwhile, young Rettich Sch�ffer is an apprentice stonecutter working on the Cathedral, wanting to buy his freedom from the bishop, so he borrows from a Jewish moneylender. The stories of Christians and Jews intertwine over the decades, with piety and decency largely absent from center stage. Surrounding the rising edifice in Hagenburg are degradations of every kind--"the siren calls of Temptation, Debauchery and Vice" and "the Magical World of the Goyyim. Sodom without cataclysm." Hypocrisy abounds, as when Father Arnold chants over the bodies of dead bandits, because "God listens to what he says....The priest gets an extra sixpence for every Last Rite he gives. He was probably praying for a massacre." Jews like Yudl ben Yitzhak Rosheimer privately regard the Cathedral as "the Abomination." To him it is "just a pile of stones and vain idols, an excrescence of the sinful earth." Well, it's either that or "the finest Cathedral in the German Lands." Across the decades, no one character dominates this story of ambition, vanity, and power. In the midst of a plague, a mother and child find cold comfort within the completed empty church as "the Witch of Winter rode the wind." A thoroughly engrossing, beautifully told look at human frailty.
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