David Madsen (1)

This is a hard novel to categorize. It's part historical fiction, part tragic-comedy, part treatise on gnostic thought, and it's part historical lecture on European renaissance-era religion and politics. But somehow it works.

In essence, "Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf" is a story of the mysticism of Gnostic thought, orbiting around the interesting and sometimes madcap reign of Pope Leo X, Giovanni de Medici. Peppe (the dwarf) serves as narrator by providing glimpses of his youth, his introduction to Gnosticism, love, and education, which ultimately lands him in a circus, and then the 'court' of Leo X (itself not an actual circus, though one could make that arguement based on Peppe's descriptions).

Peppe is more tragic than comic. He ruminates on his physically painful youth (did I mention he has a rather large hump on his back?) "In the beginning was the pain, and the pain was with me, and the pain was me. It constituted the entirety of my burgeoning consciousness."

And one can't help but make comparisons to George R.R. Martin's own tortured dwarf, Tyrion Lannister. Peppe's mother, in a drunken fit, says, "God knows, I should have suffocated you at birth." Peppe responds in his narrative, "There was a time when I would have wholeheartedly agreed with this; now, however, I am rather glad that she did not suffocate me at birth. Strange, isn't it, how one can always learn to love oneself, however ghastly one is?"

Madsen displays a large and complex vocabulary which dually proves the literate nature of the writer as well as the value of having an e-reader with a built-in dictionary. His writing is big, bold and vividly descriptive.

In one particularly expressive scene, Peppe's only love is tortured for heresy. His description displays well Madsen's vibrant writing abilities: "...what followed fills me with anguish; the memory of it grips my heart like an icy vice. As I write, I know that tears will soon come. A huge and heavy sadness covers me like a shroud, and I cannot shake it off; indeed, I do not want to - for every act of recall, every rearoused memory of what they did to her, merits the expiation of a fresh agony of the soul. A sword pierced and entered the fabric of my psyche that day, and it is there still, for I feel its blade, as sharp and as deadly as ever, move between the infinitesimal spaces where socket meets socket and joint meets joint."

The middle third of the book, author David Madsen focuses much of his time on the political wranglings of and around the papal states. I'm always very appreciative of the historic angle of any historical fiction, however the complications surrounding the Vatican, Spain and France come at the cost of any real propullsion of Peppe's story.

The themes are rather large and heavy, and several plot lines are laced with overt sexual activities. Some may argue that it's gratuitous, but I would respond that it works effectively with the overall tone and themes of the novel.

What is Gnosticism, the reader may ask. One needn't wait long as Peppe provides his definition early in the story. "We hold that there are two equally-matched powers in the universe, one good and the other evil, and these are perpetually at war with one another. The good power created spirit, while the evil power created matter. Matter...corporeal form, the body, flesh, is evil...The devil (or at least a devil) created this world and it is hell."… (more)

With a title like that you just have to pick it up off the bookshop shelf, if only to see what it's about. It's about a lot of things, some of them downright bizarre, and if I had to sum it up in just a few words I would have to describe it as a gothic codpiece-ripper.

History has remembered the first of the Medici popes, Leo X, as a man of culture who patronised artists such as Rafael and Michelangelo, began the building of the current St Peter's and was in no small part responsible for the collections of art and manuscripts now contained in the Vatican libraries. But there's a dark side to everything, or so it seems.

Leonine Rome is depicted as a city not just of profound corruption, symbolised by the syphilitic arse of the Pope himself, the result of being buggered too often by the young men procured for him from the Roman slums, and displayed by a Pope spread-eagled on his bed with his underpants round his ankles and suffering the indignity of a doctor's diagnostic finger up his fundament (that's "arse" to you), but also of pockets of gnostic heresy which reach into the heart of power and influence within the Church through the presence of Peppe, the Gnostic Dwarf of the title, who is both bosom confidant of, and procurer of well-hung young men for, His Holiness.

The collision of the rarified world of astounding power and wealth which was the Renaissance Papal court with the equally astounding world of back-street vice, brutality and human degradation in which everything and everyone is for sale creates a juxtaposition rather like dropping a bejewelled crown into a public privy. And in this world which is no more than a universal freak show, the Papal court floats majestically on a sea of shit.

The other thread to this work concerns the deadly feud between the Gnostic Master of Rome and a troublesome Inquisitor, and of the terrible and cataclysmic climax to that feud.

Violent, often disturbing, shocking and horrifying, suffused with "the evil that men do" and, in the words of another critic, "fruity and filthy", this is not your average holiday read. It is, however, a truly original and inspired piece of fiction for the reader willing to withstand an assault on his sense of moral certitude.… (more)

Madsen writes a looping dream in which famous psychoanalysts, confessional perverts, ubiquitous anxieties, persistent hungers, and erotic longings weave together convincingly for the reader and the nameless narrator.

Choice quote: "Inside the packed cathedral all was sweet odors, cool shadows, the glint and glimmer of gold, the shy presence of the numinous amid the interplay of darkness and light; polychrome saints looked down from their lofty niches: St Parthexus with his gilded phallus, St Romo and the blind lion, St Averina carrying her lacerated breasts on a silver platter; votive candles winked before gaudy shrines; above the High Altar was suspended a huge icon of the Keys-in-Triplicate, wreathed in the smoke of ambergris, rosemary, cedarwood and myrtle. Great shafts of air bisected the tenebrous interior, their passage and dispersal echoing the whispered supplications of a thousand worshippers. Ranks of gorgeously-robed acolytes were already assembled on the marble sanctuary, which was inlaid with lozenges of onyx and porphyry."… (more)