Faith and fanaticism
A m ystic a n d a m a tch m a ker strike up a n o dd frien dsh ip in The Passion Of Dolssa.
“HUMANS have the greatest capacity for evil not when they act as lone monsters but in committees, bureaucracies and boardrooms, carrying out agendas they can justify as their painful duty for the greater good.”
Author Julie Berry wrote these words in a “Historical Note” in her latest young adult (YA) novel The Passion Of Dolssa, mostly referring to the inquisitors of Christendom. These soldiers of the medieval Church were authorised to do terrible things in their quest to stamp out evil.
They are all gone now, but their modern-day counterparts still exist. Petty men and women who wield what they believe is divine authority, who insist that their interpretation of religion is the one true path, and seek to impose it on others.
The Passion Of Dolssa may be set in Europe in the 13th century, but reading Berry’s novel made me remember that wrongs committed in the name of religious fundamentalism continue to this day. And that was perhaps the most terrifying thing about it.
Berry is the author of the critically-acclaimed YA novel All The Truth’s That’s In Me, which won the 2014 Westchester Fiction Award, was named as one of the K irkus Reviews’ Best Teen Books of 2013, and was nominated for the 2014 Edgar Award, among other accolades. The New York Times Book Review called it a “distinctive novel that includes a powerful message about the value of women’s voices and what is lost when they are silenced”.
This theme of women’s voices continues in The Passion Of Dolssa, which is the tale of two remarkable women in medieval France. Botille is a wily and charismatic peasant, a matchmaker who runs a tavern with her two sisters in a tiny seaside town. Dolssa is a young gentlewoman who has been branded a heretic due to her unconventional ways of practising her faith. She’s on the run from the friar who condemned her mother to death by fire and wants Dolssa executed, too. Author: Pub lisher: are fun and infuriating at the same time. The book’s fictional account of innocent lives being destroyed by overzealous faith almost seems too impossible to be true, until you remember that similar things are happening today.
The Passion Of Dolsa’s narrative is packaged as an ancient forbidden text put together by a friar and that is eventually discovered by Berry in the modern day. Quite frankly, this framing device added little to the reading experience, and I feel the book would have been stronger without it. The stories of Botille and Dolssa were already compelling, and this “modern-day discovery” element meant a rather jarring transition from their richly imagined world back to our own.
This is made worse by the book’s rather vague and unsatisfying ending, which suddenly introduces a brand new character in the final chapter. I hate to say this, but I think I would have enjoyed Berry’s novel more had it ended 30 or 40 pages earlier.
These flaws aside, however, The Passion Of Dolssa is a highly immersive read, offering readers a look at a fascinating period of European history. While fictional, its story is still a stark warning of the dangers of religious fundamentalism, and a grim reminder that great evil can be committed by those claiming to work in God’s name.