By James Morrow
William Morrow Books, 526 pages
Available at Powerbooks
James Morrow is one very interesting writer. Often categorized in the science fiction/fantasy genre, his novels deserve a much wider audience, given the breadth of the themes and subjects he tackles, the wealth of ideas, and the high quality of his writing. This Is the Way the World Ends still stands as one of the most brilliant lampoons on the arms race, while his Only Begotten Daughter had as premise "What if God had a daughter, and not a son?" His latest is The Last Witchfinder, and while it falls under the genre of historical fiction, the first few paragraphs are immediate evidence of how fertile a mind and original an approach Morrow is in possession of.
The broad subject is that of religious persecution and how both the church and government can be complicit in furthering causes and crusades that, in the face of contemporary thinking, now look unreasonable and irrational. (Do I detect a metaphor for these times we now live in?) The setting is late 17th-century England, and our heroine is one Jennet Stearne. Her widower father is a witchfinder, earnestly believing that he does the Lord’s work in exposing witches and bringing them to their sordid deaths – whether by stoning, hanging or burning. With all her father’s peregrinations through the realm, Jennet is placed as a ward in the home of her aunt Isobel. A strong advocate of enlightenment and reason, Isobel stays abreast of the works and books of the thinkers of that age, for example, Isaac Newton. This she imparts to her "students," Jennet and the daughter of the local parson. Naturally, the parson is appalled by the kind of education his daughter is receiving and denounces Isobel as a witch. Jennet’s father sees this as a test of God to prosecute and bring to "witch-justice" his own sister-in-law. Along with the elder son, he condemns Isobel to her death, and this sparks outrage in Jennet. While submitting to parental authority, she silently resolves to personally repeal, with scientific basis, the statute and laws that give witchfinders their power and authority. This will be her lifelong ambition and raison d’être.
With this premise, there is more than enough to create a vivid picaresque tale of Jennet’s life. What’s "very Morrow" is how he embellishes his fiction with deft and unique touches. Our narrator is a book – Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. It is the book, which tells us Jennet’s story and takes us on a whirlwind tour from 1688 to the late 1750s. Liberally picking up historical figures and events, we have Jennet’s father sent to the American colonies where they become intimately acquainted with the Salem witch trials; one of the accusers eventually marries Jennet’s older brother. There is a passage where Jennet is led astray from her "life’s quest" as she is abducted by Algonquin Indians and made a squaw to one of the Indian warriors. There are meetings with Isaac Newton, when he is Master of the Mint in England, trysts with a young Benjamin Franklin, the fabled Philosopher’s Stone, Baron Montesquieu shows up at some point, and various other historical figures dot this landscape Morrow conjures for us. When Jennet and Ben Franklin go to England in the hope of repealing the witchcraft statute, they are dismissed by the various personages who can help them. On their journey back to Philadelphia, a storm throws their ship off its course, and they survive a shipwreck only to end up marooned like some Mr. and Mrs. Robinson Crusoe on what seems to be a deserted island. As it turns out, the island is a refuge for freed slaves and they head back to Philadelphia after misadventures with pirates.
Our intrepid narrator, Newton’s book, slips in and out of the proceedings, discoursing on things as seemingly off-tangent as the screenplays of the Dracula and Frankenstein movies of the 1950s, and yet have direct bearing on how we better understand our heroine, and how certain situations and mindsets have not really changed in the course of time. The fears, obsessions, characters, and circumstances may change, but certain human frailties will always be a constant, acting as factors for much oppression and unfairness persist as part of the human condition.
And consistently, there’s the impeccable writing of Morrow. He maintains a fast pace with plot developments and twists and turns. There are pithy observations and wordplay, as when Jennet remarks, "Aunt Isobel once told me that a compromise occurs when a person gives up something he pretends to want so as to gain an object for which he feigns indifference." Before her execution, Aunt Isobel entrusts to 13-year-old Jennet a pamphlet, which Isobel has written. This pamphlet will be Isobel "guiding" Jennet as she hits adolescence and encounters men in her life. As it will include sections dealing with 17th-century contraceptive devices et. al., Isobel refers to it as "a body of knowledge and a knowledge of bodies."
The last chapters of the book have Jennet undergoing trial herself as a witch in the colonies, if only to use it as the means to finally bring down the statute. At this point, the novel becomes a compelling courtroom drama, with Jennet’s brother being summoned to stand as the prosecutor in her trial. Morrow deftly stacks up the cards in this book, giving us one great yarn, while providing substantial food for thought. This is that kind of book you come across every so often: you’re so taken with the story, you can’t stop, wanting to know what happens next, and yet, at some point, you dread the fact that you see the pages dwindling, and the novel is coming to its end.