Sister Fidelma Eats Breakfast and Solves a Mystery

"Fidelma mentally shut her ears to the scratchy voice of the woman, and ate mechanically of the cereal and fruit placed before her." (Peter Tremayne, Absolution By Murder: A Sister Fidelma Mystery, p. 173)

Cereal and fruit for breakfast? You mean cornflakes with a banana? Oh, wait, Sister Fidelma lived in the Dark Ages: the year 664 to be exact. No cornflakes. No bananas.

Absolution by Murder (published 1995) is the first book in a long series. In it, Sister Fidelma is attending a very complicated meeting between the Saxon Christians and the Irish Christians. The church authorities and members of the nobility are discussing several passionate issues, such as how to set the date of Easter and whether members of religious orders should be allowed to marry.

A combination of political ambitions and religious fanaticism drives the very numerous principal characters -- in fact, the first 50 pages is entirely dedicated to description of what seem to be dozens of these people. Finally, we get to the point: several murders punctuate the proceedings. Sister Fidelma from Ireland, who is qualified as an expert on legal matters, and a similarly trained male representative of the English factions are assigned to find the culprit, and at last there's a plot.

Alas, several very long discussions of church matters derail the action that one expects when reading a mystery novel, even a historical one. I also found too much reliance on the way all the characters spoke different languages, so had a variety of translation issues which for me slowed down the action, though I'm sure it was very historically accurate. Although the author uses a stylized and rather affected way of writing dialog, it didn't really convince me the way that some historical novels do. Maybe it owed a bit to Sir Walter Scott, famous inventor of a fake-archaic Medieval language irreverently called tushery.

The level of detail about these historically researched disputes is excruciating, so one would hope there would at least be some nice cultural and social history to make it a little more entertaining. As always, I look for food details, and I was pretty disappointed in them, as well as in the other cultural stuff. Cereal and fruit indeed! Couldn't the author at least have called it porridge?

A few other food quotes make me think the author just wasn't that interested in culinary history. There just isn't any effort to portray the food in a vivid or distinctive way. Here are a few quotes that show the author's lack of effort at detail, except for the use of an ancient word, paximatium:

"... thirty of the brethren laboured over steaming cooking pots to supply the wants of the great abbey and its guests." (p. 182). 

"The kitchens... were still full of strong odours, with the inevitable reek of stale boiled cabbage and herbs dominating." (p. 221).

"She had merely eaten some fruit and a piece of paximatium, the heavy bread, and then gone immediately to her cubiculum to rest for a while." (p. 155).  

"Jugs of cool milk, jars of honey and paximatium, the twice-baked bread, were being distributed to each table." (p. 209).

Unfortunately the author wasn't that into social history either. I felt there was a lack of effort to place the characters' attitudes and speech in their historic time, such as a character saying "Let us say Deusdedit had a heart attack" instead of reflecting whatever medical analysis they would have made. Or several times, characters handle books as if they were the same then as now, which they weren't: "Seaxwulf slammed the book shut." (p. 181 and p. 194)

The relationships of the characters made me think of a twentieth century feminist awakening novel, or even about another book I've been reading,  Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit (published 2020). Although we are told that women in Ireland in this era were given exceptionally many privileges and extraordinary access to education, the way the character is portrayed still seems to me a bit too modern-feminist in tone. For example, right at the beginning of the book, Sister Fidelma encounters a brutish Saxon:

"The warrior, Wulfric, had moved so that his mount was close to the young religieuse. He leant forward in his saddle towards her. Her nose wrinkled as she smelt his foul breath and saw his blackened teeth grinning at her. He was clearly impressed that, young as she was, and woman that she was, she did not seem afraid of him or of his companions." (pp. 5-6). 

I'll just add a couple of other quotations with a contrasting quote from Recollections of My Nonexistence.

"The man was handing the key to Eadulf when he suddenly glanced at Fidelma. He grinned lewdly and said something which his companion found amusing." (Absolution by Murder, p. 102). 

"Fidelma found it an irritating mannerism of all Saxons that if a man were present he always took precedence over a woman." (Absolution by Murder, p. 137).

"You could be harmed a little— by insults and threats that reminded you you were not safe and free and endowed with certain inalienable rights— or more by a rape, or more by a rape-kidnapping-torture-imprisonment-mutilation, more yet by murder, and the possibility of death always hung over the other aggressions. You could be erased a little so that there was less of you, less confidence, less freedom, or your rights could be eroded, your body invaded so that it was less and less yours, you could be rubbed out altogether, and none of those possibilities seemed particularly remote. All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman." (Recollections of My Nonexistence, p. 57). 

On the amazon.com page for Absolution by Murder we learn: "Peter Tremayne is the pseudonym for Peter Berresford Ellis, a well-respected authority on the ancient Celts. He is the author of over twenty books, including The Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, The Celtic Dawn: A History of Pan Celticism, and The Druids." So one assumes that the endless descriptions of the political scene and the religious disputes are perfectly accurate. Unfortunately, I get the feeling that the author just doesn't care about the other details, including some very modern-sounding discussion of a same-sex attraction where one of the characters uses the word "homosexual," which might be an anachronism, whatever language they were supposed to be speaking. Maybe someone will show me that I'm wrong.

I'm grateful to Claudia, who blogs at https://honeyfromrock.blogspot.com/ for reviewing another book in the Sister Fidelma series and thus introducing me to Sister Fidelma. This review is entirely my own, © 2020 by mae sander for my blog, maefood dot blogspot dot com. If you read this at another site, it's been pirated.