"1570 in the city of Ferrara and the convent of Santa Caterina is filled with noble women who are married to Christ because many cannot find husbands outside. Enter sixteen year old Serafina, ripped by her family from an illicit love affair, howling with rage and determined to escape"
I was a convent school girl and I remember very well the sick feeling of horror that crept over me when the Reverend Mother of our school announced, with a beaming smile, that one of our contemporaries had been called to God and had taken the veil in an enclosed order. She was 16 years old. The fact that someone that young had chosen to wall themselves up in a Holy Order haunted me for days so when I opened this book which opens with the hysterical screams and panic of the new novice, I felt the same feeling creep over me and my sympathies were totally engaged.
Suora Zuana, the nun who runs the dispensary and who herself only came to the convent after the death of her father and she was alone in the world, is given Serafina as an apprentice and a relationship, a friendship only let me make that clear, grows between them. This is watched closely and jealously by the novice mistress, Suora Umiliana, who is a crusader for stricter piety, and the Abbess, Madonna Chiara who has her own hidden agenda.
The entire story is set in the enclosed walls of the convent and the sense of claustrophobia is overwhelming. Serafina, who has a voice of great beauty, at first refuses to sing in the choir, she will not give an inch "Oh sweet Jesus....is this how it is going to be? Day after day after day, is this how it will be? Because if so, she will die of it"
She plans to find a way to contact her lover, her music teacher, and realises the way to let him know that she is alive, is by the use of her voice. After singing at mass where the public are present she sings so beautifully that a member of the congregation shouts 'Brava'. She recognises it is the voice of her lover and redoubles her plans to escape.
To leave a convent is to invite shame and degradation and to be cast off by one's family, so not a task undertaken lightly. Serafina lulls the convent into a sense of security by her seeming piety and willingness to sing and to listen to the novice mistress and then after weeks of planning and smuggling notes to her lover by the simple expedient of wrapping them round a stone and throwing them over the wall, she makes her move. Discovered and caught by Suora Zuana and the Abbess she is confined to her cell, where the Abbess tells her that her lover has deserted her and has, in fact, already tried to seduce another wealthy pupil of another family and has been disgraced and left the city.
But has he? Suora Zuana finds it strange that such a constant young man should suddenly abandon his mistress and when she receives outside information that Jacopo has been attacked and left for dead, she starts to look at the abbess with suspicion and to suspect her motives.
I cannot continue much further without giving away the plot, the twists and turns and outcome and I would hate to do that, as it is not clear until the very last few pages. The politicking inside the convent walls is virulent and cloaked under a front of piety and religious belief when really it is a power struggle, pure and simple.
Though the characters are imaginary as is the convent the history in which this story is embedded is fact. One of the final decrees of the Council of Trent (which I remember studying at my convent school) was a reform of nunneries, in response to the challenges thrown up by the Protestant Reformation. Though the D'Este family protected the convents for a while in Ferrara, the changes came. All contact with the outside world was restricted, windows bricked up, grilles put in place everywhere. Churches were redesigned so that the congregation had no sight of the nuns, and families and visitors could no longer mingle together. Music was severely restricted and convent orchestras prohibited.
"Many of us are shut up against our will and deprived of all contact with the outside world. Living such restrictions and abandoned by everyone, we have only hell, in this world and the next" extract from a letter sent to the Pope himself by a nun in Bologna in 1586.
It is against this background that all the intrigues are set and it is important to know this as it explains the motivation for certain actions and makes the feelings of certain characters much clearer.
I have not read any of Sarah Dunant's books though I have often picked them up and looked at them and then put them down again. Trying to think of a reason for this, and I think it is because my first glance showed that much of the writing is in the present tense which I find difficult to get on with - don't know why, but as quite a few books I have read over the last year have been in this format, I have had to get used to it. I now find it does not upset me as it used to and, indeed, after a while you do not notice it and the change from present to past tense creates a tension all of its own.
A deeply satisfying read, beautifully written which engages and holds the reader in thrall from the first to the last page and is on my list for my top books of 2009. I sat up late last night to finish it and the impression it has made on me has stayed with me and caused me some little discomfort. The thought of those women, some of them reluctant inmates, incarcarated inside four walls, never going outside, never seeing the world still makes me shudder, and I was brought up a Roman Catholic so this way of life is not strange to me.
And, you may be interested to hear, that the school friend mentioned at the start of this post, remained as an enclosed nun for some 12 years when I heard through other contacts, that she had left her convent, renounced her vows (this would have been in late 1970s so perhaps there would have been less understanding than now), married an insurance salesman and had four children.....
