This novel is set in 1149 Palermo, Sicily, where power struggles between East and West have left King Roger hard pressed to maintain his throne. Both the Pope and the Bishop of Rome refuse to recognize his rule, and Conrad Hohenstaufen (ruler of the west) and Manuel Comnenus (ruler of the east) are threatening to invade Sicily to secure their powers. Palermo has always been tolerant to various ethnic communities, but a Christian group is making false accusations against Muslims, Jews, and other "outsiders" to take over power.

Thurstan Beauchamp narrates this story. He is a young man still, the son of a Norman knight and a Saxon mother. He works in the Diwan of Control, the central financial office at the palace, where his employer is Yusuf Ibn Mansur, a Muslim man with political savvy and of unimpeachable honesty who is willing to help Thurstan become influential if he can avoid falling into one of the dangerous political games the various factions are playing against each other. Traveling throughout Europe as "Purveyor of Pleasures and Shows," Thurstan finds a group of five Yazidis, including Nesrin, a belly dancer with uncommon talent, and immediately hires them to come to Palermo to perform for the king. He is drawn to Nesrin's great beauty and allure, but things take yet another turn when he meets again with the Lady Alicia on the same trip, once his great love when he was still a boy and she then just a girl also. Now she has returned from the land of Jerusalem as a widow of considerable wealth, and seems just as taken with Thurstan, who finds his love for her has not abated over the years.

Further complicating matters, we learn early on that Thurstan's most cherished dream has been to become a knight and fight in the crusades, as his father has done before him, though this opportunity was taken away from him just when it seemed about to be realised. Now with Lady Alicia's return on the scene, many opportunities beckon. The novel builds up at a moderate pace, all the while filled with period details which inform us about aspects of daily life in 12th century Palermo. Thurstan, narrating in the first person from the vantage point of a period after the events have taken place, is a personable main character, whom we cannot help but empathise with though he makes many grave gaffes and mistakes, and much as his naivety and youth show he has yet much to learn, we see the events though his eyes before he had gained the advantage of hindsight, so that the reader is offered only glimpses of the whole, until a complex mystery is revealed.

A jewel of a book which I can't wait to reread to pick up on all the fine intricate details I may have missed the first time. I also loved Andrew Sachs' narration in the audio version. A well-earned five stars for this gem.

November 2014

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Reading Barry Unsworth's account of life in 12th century Sicily brings forcefuly in focus the famous George Santayana quote I used as an epigraph.
What makes 12 century Sicily so special and so relevant today? It was, for a very short span of time, a viable multi-cultural, interfaith society, where Normans, Saracens, Byzantines, Jews and Papists lived together in almost harmony. It will be brought to ruin by greed, vanity and intolerance  most of it coming form the Catholics and their 'divine right' to rule the lesser races. The novel describes the forced expropriations of Muslims, the hatred and mistrust in the aftermath of the crushing defeat of Christian armies in the Second Crusade, and the narrow mindedness of monks ( These Moslems are allowed to live and breed among us, their blood is corrupted, they will corrupt the blood of Holy Church, our blood. ).

The main character, whose name (Thurstan Beauchamp) is a clear indication of his mixed Norman and French blood, is a young clerk working in a ministry (Diwan) dominated by Muslims. He is an idealist, who seems ill suited for the actual job he is doing : a spy for the king, with a cover job as a purveyor of pleasures (hiring dancers, singers and acrobats for the king's entertainment). His naivety is endearing in the beginning of the story, when he expresses his admiration for the job the king is doing keeping the peace between the different ethnicities on the island, his respect for his Arab boss and his belief in the rule of law :

... I was swept by a familiar love for this city of Palermo, where I had spent most of my years, for the diversity these sounds expressed, the different faiths that lived together here, the different races that jostled in the markets and laboured on the buildings that were rising everywhere, praying apart and having their cases tried in their own tongues, but all held together in unity by our great King.

The best example Thurstan can give us about what the city of Palermo has to offer is in the description of the Royal Chapel, a key setting of the novel, "where Saracens had carved the wood of the ceiling, Latins made the marble inlays, Greeks set the stones of the mosaics, all working together to make a church where our Norman King could hear the mass."

As a first person narrator, Thurstan can be somewhat excused for trying to paint himself in a positive light, but his later actions speak louder about his envious and vain nature, his ambition to become a knight, his gullibility and the shallowness of his fine principles when confronted with life and death situations  I thought he was particularly clueless about the plot to destroy his Muslim patron and mentor, and that he gave in much too easily to blackmail  . Overall, his human weakness is what will probably reconcile the reader with the wrong decisions Thurstan makes and his youth might excuse his lack of subtlety in the cloak & dagger business and in the romantic dillema between the two women in his life : the elegant and sophisticated Lady Alicia, and the exotic (Yazidi) belly dancer Nesrin.

She could not have so deceived me if I had not deceived myself; she could not have played me false if I had not aided her in it. I had fashioned her in the form of my desires, I had made her shining, lustrous from our childhood and the time of my hope, bright with the future when she would make that hope come true, a creature of light, not her own, bestowed on her. She had no light of her own ...

All in all, this was an informative, multi-layered historical adventure, more serious than its unfortunately chosen title might suggest, that manages to recreate one of the most exciting moments in early Middle Age history, touching on still relevant issues regarding a multi-cultural society, coupled with a dramatic coming of age story of a young man who learns to see the rust, the dirt and the blood hiding under the shiny armours of the knights and under the immaculate robes of the monks. This disillusionment with both government and religion is another factor that remains relevant in the present day, when young men and women must find the strength and the moral guidance they need in other institutions or creeds.

[I have learned that] ... there had never been a silver barge to keep afloat, that this King to whom I had woved my service, was a man with a face like other faces I had seen, the face of one who lived with us in the dark water, among the other creatures feasting and fighting there.

Barry Unsworth captivated me previously with "The Songs of Kings" and with "Morality Play", and confirmed his status as one of the best in the field with the present historical novel. Next on my radar is "Sacred Hunger", dealing with another thorny subject - slavery.

Took a while to get into this but the payback was well worth it

A 3.5 if I could give half-stars. "A Novel of Intrigue" indeed -- a funhouse mirror of historical perfidy, shifting political tides, perceptions and misconceptions, betrayal and redemption. At times hard to follow and uneven, but an interesting plot.

Daca ar fi cazul sa compar subiectul acestei carti cu ceva, fara sa ma gandesc prea mult raspunsul meu ar fi: un ghem din care ies multe fire. Cand crezi ca urmaresti firul principal, te trezesti cu alt fir care isi scoate capul la iveala.
Da, are un personaj principal si da, totul se petrece intr-o perioada scurta de timp, dar totul este atat de excesiv complicat! Este ca si cum autorul stie foarte bine toate "ingredientele" pentru a scrie o carte buna, doar ca nu stie sa le puna in ordinea corecta si exagereaza folosindu-le pe toate.
Am citit-o destul de greu, deci nu primeste nota mare de la mine. Poate altcineva, cu o minte mai limpede si liniste destula ii va acorda o nota mai mare :)

This novel is set in 12th century Sicily, a place where Christians, Jews, and Moslems have been co-existing in relative peace for decades under the the rule of the Norman king Roger II. The main character, Thurstan Beauchamp, is the protege of a Moselm minister, Yusuf, and works in one of the royal chanceries as a purveyor of entertainments and sometime spy and bearer of bribes. Despite the book's moderate length, the plot is quite complicated. Thurstan becomes involved in a treacherous web of court intrigue and courtly love while at the same time forging a bond with Nesrin, the youngest member of an Anatolian bellydancing troupe he has hired to entertain the king and his court. It's fascinating and emotionally involving.
Thurstan's character development is also crucial to the novel. He starts out idealistic and innocent in many ways. His path towards wisdom is costly and painful, but by the end he has arrived at an understanding of the nature of power, what is truly valuable to him, and the difference between real love and friendship and the illusion of them.

Es una novela muy bien documentada, Unsworth refleja en ella gran conocimiento de los acontecimientos políticos y la sociedad del siglo XII. Como el rubí en su ombligo, esta es una joya que vale la pena contemplar.

I read it because I loved "Sacred Hunger" so much. I was disappointed , but I will read his 2 novels that were nominated for the Booker Prize.

Yikes, this book was no fun to read. I liked Sacred Hunger enough to read it several times, but this one was bad enough to make it the last Unsworth book I plan to read. Unappealing characters, a predictable and trite plot with some awkward philosophy shoe-horned into the last pages and the worst aspects of first-person narrative fiction - this book had it all. Had it not been my only book while on a trip, I would have never finished it.

Achei um grande exagero do ''The times'' comparar esse livro a ''O nome da rosa''...Não achei a história tão envolvente assim, certas metáforas utilizadas pelo autor foram prolixas demais e a narrativa não foi bem construída em primeira pessoa, a meu ver...

The Ruby in her Navel is historical fiction at its best. Set just after the disastrous second crusade, it tells the story of an inexperienced but extravagantly romantic young man of many talents who is frustrated in his desire to be a knight. At the court of King Roger of Sicily a delicate balance persists between Frankish, Lombard, Norman and Saracen factions, a balance that the failure of the crusade has thrown into crisis.

Young Norman, Thursten, was trained for the knighthood and is awash in fantasies of its chivalrous nature and the key role its virtues play in preserving and furthering the spiritual and temporal power of the King, as ordained by God. When fate throws insurmountable obstacles that interrupt his path to knighthood, he sets his mind to learning Greek, Arabic and improving his Latin and makes himself indispensable to his Saracen master, Yusuf, in the Diwan of Control. His inexperience and overarching false idealism is a splinter in his eye that obscures the threats that surround him and those he holds dear. A chance encounter with some Yazidi dancers from the Seljuk Kingdom of Rum are the spark that sets him on the painful path to self-knowledge.

Unsworth's writing is sublime and his themes of intercultural cooperation and competition are clearly as relevant in the Middle East of today as they were during the times of the crusades. His descriptions of the harrowing flight from defeat on the battlefield and the trauma it wreaked on some survivors is extremely moving but his sympathies are evenly distributed and the world of political machinations that spawned these tragedies is brilliantly described. Unsworth has written brilliantly about the slave trade and medieval morality players too. There seems to be no world he cannot illuminate with brilliance and I will look out everything else he's written.

Barry Unsworth, despite having won the Booker Prize at one point in his nearly half-century of writing novels, does not seem to have ever risen to the peak of notability in the reading public's estimation (or, at least, he hasn't remained there over the years). He'd have warranted better on the strength of his historical novels, which are meticulously researched, extremely evocative of their time and place, and have a lyrical prose style that stays with the reader after the novel is done.

In this case, there's a fair degree of novelty even in Unsworth's chosen setting, taking us to the Norman Kingdom of Sicily in the 12th century, during the reign of King Roger II, the apex of the power of the House of Hauteville. This isn't a common setting for medieval historical fiction, and Unsworth milks every bit of interest he can out of this fascinating place, at the cultural juncture of western Europe, the Byzantine Empire, and the Islamic world.

This novel was published in 2006, no doubt inspired by the burgeoning War on Terror, but its examination of sectarian conflict and the totalizing effect of ideology is every bit as pertinent a decade later, if not more so, given the recent rise of xenophobic nationalism and Islamophobia in much of western politics.