An author given a sensational theme can achieve a satisfactory result by exercising creative and writerly restraint. My examples are Arthur Conan Doyle, James Blish, Neil Gaiman and Poul Anderson.
(i) Doyle's theme is a legendary supernatural hound. The actual hound, appearing only once before it is shot dead at the climax of the novel, is a large but natural animal, its eyes and mouth made luminous by the application of phosphorus.
(ii) Demons released from Hell do not run riot through the world in the sequel to James Blish's Black Easter. Instead, something more interesting happens.
(iii) In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, Morpheus enters Hell expecting conflict with Lucifer Morningstar only to find an empty realm and to be told by Lucifer himself that he has resigned as Lord of Hell.
(iv) In Poul Anderson's "Death and the Knight" the Knights Templar are - wait for it - orthodox Christians revering a relic believed to be the jawbone of Abraham. (What a relief!)
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
It's interesting to recall how Anderson seems to have once accepted the more negative view of the Templars, as seen in ROGUE SWORD, and compare that to the more nuanced view of them as seen in "Death And The Knight." By then Anderson was more cautious about accepting malicious stories about the Templars spread by their enemies (esp. Philip IV of France). No perfect (no group of men will ever be that!), but by no means villainous monsters.
Ad astra! Sean
Philip was able to destroy the Templars in large part because their loansharking and other activities had made them deeply unpopular, much more so than other crusading Orders.
People believed the stories because they already disliked the Temple.
Unpopularity won't necessarily destroy you directly, but it's sort of grease on the steps, making mishaps more likely and recovery from them harder.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, if you are unpopular, that will make it easier for your downfall, if and when it comes, to be FATAL and permanent. Something Philip IV made use of destroy the Templars.
One of the many things I don't know much about are the banking activities of the Templars. Wha I recall is that their activities in that line of work comprised one of the earliest truly international system of banking and financial services. Was it possibly simply the strangeness of such a thing as international banking which contributed to the Templars unpopularity?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: for starters, a lot of what they did was in violation of canon law, which forbade interest in most case.
(This is why so many bankers were Jews, in both Christendom and the House of Islam.)
And they were notably ruthless in dunning people and taking every stitch of their property if they missed payments.
Note in "Death and the Knight", the Templars are holding the Patrol agent in a house they repossessed from a craftsman who couldn't repay.
Nobody likes bankers at the best of times, no matter how necessary they are, and in a medieval economy -- given to fluctuations nobody understood, with an unstable and inefficient monetary system -- it was much worse.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
So there were some legitimate grounds for disliking the Templars. Human beings what they are, I am not surprised. And they should not have been so ruthless to defaulters, if only to minimize dislike for them!
It would have been prudent, as well as humane, if the Templars had worked out ways for debtors to repay loans. Perhaps some kind of month by month installment plan?
I realize high interest rates then were partly because of high risk and that unstable and inefficient monetary system you mentioned, but it might have been prudent to have charged lower rates.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: that’s where their arrogance and vanity came in. They were a holy crusading order; anyone who tried to cheat them was cheating God, effectively!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, and Proverbs has a line about pride going before a fall! And they should have remembered how Scripture said how God disapproved of merciless lenders.
Ad astra! Sean
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