“The Sheen on the Silk” by Anne Perry, $27
British novelist Anne Perry has built her name and a successful career with Victorian mysteries and other books set in a reasonably familiar past. In “The Sheen on the Silk,” she steps back almost 800 years to the vanished culture of Byzantium in the late 13th century, but doesn’t quite find her footing.
The problem is not that Perry hasn’t done her homework; she gives the reader a real feel for the sights, sounds and smells of Constantinople in the time of the Crusades, as well as tastes of Venice, Rome, Sicily and Jerusalem. The problem is that her heroine is never completely realized, surrounded by repetition and baroque overwriting in almost every other area:
“Sheen” at first feels like a mystery. Anna Lascaris Zarides, a physician, comes to Constantinople to prove that her twin brother Justinian was innocent of a murder. Disguised as Anastasius, a eunuch, Anna has the freedom to treat men and women from the poorest to the noblest ranks and to ask endless questions about Justinian and his friends.
She does it within the historic context of a period when European ambitions pressed against the old Eastern Roman Empire from the West, the rising power of Islam created tensions from the East, and Christians everywhere squabbled over theology.
There is a lot of talk in “Sheen” about the “Filioque” clause in the Nicene Creed, one of the foundational statements of belief in traditional Christianity. “Filioque” refers to the source of the Holy Spirit and means “and of the Son.”
The Western Church inserted the clause into the Creed unilaterally in 589 at the Third Council of Toledo. The Orthodox Churches rejected that, insisting the Spirit came from the Father, period.
And if the paragraph above made your eyes glaze over, just wait.
The Eastern Orthodox and Latin branches of the Christian Church formally excommunicated one another over the Filioque in the ninth century. In “Sheen,” it’s a huge issue, as rule-bound Romans try to make freer Orthodox convert en masse.
A huge cast includes some historic figures (the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus) and others who are fictional. Most of them are explored in far too much detail. Many of them prove forgettable as the story line stretches out over more than a decade, sagging in the process.
Exploring the role of eunuchs, ubiquitous in the Byzantine Empire, is an original and worthwhile angle. Perry has fun with the gleefully wicked-yet-pious Zoe Chrysaphes, a figure who’s reminiscent of Livia in “I, Claudius,” and creates an engaging half-Venetian, half-Byzantine sailor in Giuliano Dandolo.
But the mystery, as well as the guilty secret Anna carries, lose their interest about halfway into this too-big book. It would be a better, less-Byzantine story with fewer characters and more character development.
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
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