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Havoc, In Its Third Year
By Ronan Bennett
Simon & Schuster, 2004. 247 pages.
Reviewed by Christy Risser-Milne
Quick, name three things you know about the Puritans. Here are the three I came up with before reading this book:
- They wore funny clothes (or at the very least big buckles on their shoes and bizarre hats)
- They were an extremely strict religious sect who eventually abandoned England for the New World and are known to many as the Pilgrims
- They invented Thanksgiving in the United States (well, before it was the United States, but you know what I mean)
How close are my first three to yours? My guess is that they are very similar. But Ronan Bennett chooses to begin this novel about the Puritans with an ominous quotation from Goethe: “Mistrust all in whom the desire to punish is imperative.”
Sure, I’ve been to the restoration of Plymouth colony in Massachusetts. They have stocks there (I believe there may even have been a photo taken of me “locked” in them many long years ago), but an “imperative” to punish? Bennett had me hooked. And although this book certainly warrants a slow, careful reading (for, if nothing else, the sake of understanding those troubling times), his gifts as a storyteller took me through the novel in record time.
It turns out that the Puritans were not just the persecuted who fled England fearing for their lives; they were also persecutors. Bennett’s careful research of early seventeenth-century England reveals a disturbing reality that gives every appearance of not having changed much in the intervening 400 years.
[M]en of property were gripped by fears. They feared enemies without and within. Massing at the gates were fanatical, brainwashed followers of [faiths with which the Puritans disagreed theologically] determined to extinguish their liberties, religion, heritage and institutions -- what today we would call their very way of life.
That sounds almost too familiar for comfort. Yet as we read further into Bennett’s notes before the story itself begins, we find that he, too, was surprised by the striking similarities his research revealed between the Puritans and what is called the Religious Right in today’s United States. He writes,
What follows is a fictionalized imagining of one such experiment [in a faith-based community] in the remodeling of a community in the north of England in the early 1630s. I have seen no evidence to support the assertion that when history repeats itself it does so as farce. Tragedy, it seems, comes round again and again.
Upon reading that, I feared that this the novel would become more of a thinly-veiled polemic against the Bush administration than an historical novel. I was wrong. Instead, Havoc, in its Third Year is an excellently-written, meticulously researched novel of the highest quality. This is one of the very few novels I would close on the final page, and then immediately reopen to read again. It’s that good.
With a lyricism of language that appears to be almost a hereditary trait with Irish writers, Bennett weaves a story of intrigue, honesty, deceit, hatred, and love as intricate as a medieval tapestry. There are no saints sitting in a haloed light in this story. Instead, there are human beings trying to eke out an existence in a world where only those who “have” are entitled to much of anything. And those who “have” live in constant fear of losing all of it to the whim of a fearsome, violent, and lust-filled group of religious zealots controlling the town. No one is above suspicion, excepting those who have the power to kill those with whom they disagree.
Bennett’s protagonist, a closet Roman Catholic named John Brigge, wants only to work his land, love his wife, and be left alone. Unfortunately, being Catholic is itself a crime, and his position as coroner for the region prevents his being left alone. We watch, as helpless as Brigge himself, as he works to uncover the truth about a woman wrongly accused of killing her newborn child, and in so doing is himself undone by the powerful individuals behind the original accusation. It is difficult to watch, but it is an important lesson, especially if we take Bennett’s warning at the start of the book seriously.
I may not be quite able to believe that the situation in the United States could ever become as horrible as that of Brigge’s world; but had Brigge actually existed, I imagine he would have found his own circumstances to be unimaginable. Perhaps we can only do as Brigge did: pray that the world will change and our children might know a different way of life.
So here are the three things that now come to mind when I think of the Puritans:
- They were religious fundamentalists and persecutors of the worst sort and became the persecuted once they were ousted from power
- They held a theological view of the world that has little to do with Jesus or the Bible, and everything to do with power
- They are the forebears of today’s purveyors of “moral values” in the United States
May God have mercy upon us all.
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