A LION IN JERUSALEM
Justin Cartwright’s latest novel talks of belief, of love, of faith and religion, of writing itself. By Michele Magwood
LION HEART Justin Cartwright (Bloomsbury, R255)
THERE should be a new term in literary description: the “Cartwrightian” phrase. Justin Cartwright is a master at inserting sly, knowing observations, thin as acupuncture needles, that shoot through paragraphs like acid. There may be thousands of kilometres and hundreds of years between this novel and his last bestseller, the state-of-the-zeitgeist Other People’s Money, but early on in the story he delivers up a hallmark Cartwrightian observation: “My father had no evidence, but he trusted his intuition. People who take drugs often do. To them much is revealed through close, leisurely selfexamination.”
The father in question is one Alaric Cathar, a dissolute, delusional old hippy who changed his surname from the more prosaic Carter when he became a medieval scholar at Oxford. He named his son Richie after his hero Richard Coeur de Lion, the towering, belligerent Crusader king.
‘In the hands of a lesser novelist it might well have unravelled, but Cartwright is too canny, too aware, to
slip the knots’
Richie is 30-something now, his estranged father dead and his distempered girlfriend off in the arms of a creative writing lecturer, “a beardy wannabe DH Lawrence who pops his fat northern face into Wikipedia half an hour before a lecture and jots down the names of two or three writers he has never read, with a few crafty quotes to lard his talk…”
Splenetic, unmoored and alone, Richie takes off for Jerusalem in his father’s quixotic footsteps to study Crusader art and trace the resting place of the True Cross. There he falls in love with a Canadian-Arab journalist named Noor, who may or may not be a spy and who disappears in Cairo in the maelstrom of the Arab Spring.
The story segues between the ancient and modern Holy Land and contemporary Britain, touches down in Greece and Provence, in the monolithic Crusader castles of Jordan, the doughty dining halls of Oxford. Warrior kings vie with counterterrorism agents, priests with psychiatrists.
“The idea was not to write a traditional historical novel, all set hermetically in the same time,” Cartwright says on the phone from London. “In fact, there are a few hints that it is all about writing itself.”
As one of his characters puts it: “By reading, and giving his consent to be beguiled, the reader becomes complicit with the writer, to some extent creating his own fiction.”
As such, Cartwright’s invitation to us is challenging. He unfurls a tapestry stitched from a seemingly impossible number of genres. It is an historical novel, a grail quest, a love story, a modern spy thriller, a meditation on bloodlines and identity, faith and religion. In the hands of a lesser novelist it might well have unravelled, but Cartwright is too canny, too aware, to slip the knots.
The very fabric of Lion Heart is the nature of, and ceaseless need for, belief. “There are thousands of tiny crosses carved into the walls of the Holy Sepulchre Church in Jerusalem, by pilgrims and Crusaders who left their homes, risked and lost their lives, all to have their sins washed away,” he says. “They were similar to jihadists.
“I was on a panel in Toronto recently and a professor of theology couldn’t give us any sensible, workable definition of what God is.” He pauses. “We’ll never stop; we’ll never make sense of life.”
Endlessly droll, endlessly interesting, Cartwright can always beguile us into complicity with him. —