History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 7/10 · Translated from German

• Accuracy: Not history but legend, retold from Hartmann von Aue’s medieval poem Gregorius; the medieval world is stylised on purpose.
• Readability: Witty and ornate, narrated by an Irish monk with a taste for learned jokes.
• Plot: A child born of incest grows up, unknowingly marries his mother, spends seventeen years in penance on a rock, and becomes pope.

The novel opens with the bells of Rome ringing by themselves. The narrator, Clemens, an Irish Benedictine at St Gall, explains that the spirit of storytelling is ringing them, and then tells the tale of Gregorius.

It is an old legend. The twin children of a duke of Flanders and Artois fall into incest. Their son is set adrift at sea, raised by monks, becomes a knight, rescues a besieged duchess, marries her, and learns she is his mother. In horror he has himself chained to a rock in a lake, where he survives seventeen years on a kind of nourishing earth-milk, until Rome, seeking a new pope, is directed by vision to find him.

Mann tells it with enormous playfulness. Clemens’s language mixes German, Latin, French and English, with archaisms and coinages. The book is a meditation on sin and grace, and also on storytelling itself: how tales are passed on, embellished and believed.

The comedy is real, but so is the seriousness. Written in the years after the Second World War, it asks whether monstrous guilt can be forgiven, and whether grace can reach those who have done the unforgivable. Mann does not answer glibly.

It is also slight beside his great novels. The characters are figures in a legend rather than developed people, and the linguistic games can feel self-indulgent, particularly in H.T. Lowe-Porter’s English version, where much of the wordplay flattens.

The 7 reflects a charming, erudite and unusual book that works best for readers who enjoy Mann’s irony and medieval literature. As a historical novel it barely qualifies. As a late meditation on sin and forgiveness disguised as comic legend, it is a small gem.