THE KNIGHT TEMPLAR

Author: Jan Guillou
Year: 1999
Publisher: Piratförlaget
Language: Swedish

It has been ten long years since the last pages of the first book in Jan Guillou’s trilogy about Arn Magnusson were turned. Arn, serves his penitence as a Knight Templar in the Holy Land where he has been promoted to lord of a remote castle south of Jerusalem. His beloved Cecilia endures her own purgatory, confined within the austere walls of a convent presided over by a spiteful abbess, a sworn foe to the ancient bloodlines from which both Arn and Cecilia descend. To debate who among them suffers the greater agony is futile. For while Arn strides across the stage of history, his stature rising amidst the revered ranks of one of Christendom's most formidable orders, Cecilia is entombed in a stone sarcophagus, where each breath is a silent rebellion against the tyrannies of a cruel and relentless gaoler who delights in her power to torment and subdue.

As with the opening volume of this series, the author's command of history is both impressive and nimble, allowing him to weave thread after thread of fact into a credible and absorbing universe. He summons forth the towering figures of the age with both elegance and ease. Saladin, resplendent in his court of many a historical character, along with a cavalcade of kings, dukes, knights, and bishops from the Christian realm. He even manages to inserts a brief but ridiculous encounter between Arn and a youthful Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe, a tongue-in-cheek jab at the venerable Sir Walter Scott, the unsurpassed master of the genre.

Jan Guillou, furthermore, continues to craft exquisite landscapes for his readers, drawing them effortlessly into the sun-scorched deserts of Palestine or the shadowed, sombre halls of Gudhem nunnery. He has an unquestionable talent to conjure these distant worlds into vivid being without succumbing to the dreariness of exhaustive description. In Guillou's prose, action remains ever at the forefront, yet we are never deprived of the sights, scents, and sounds of the protagonist’s surroundings. With each turn of the page, we find ourselves immersed in a world that feels startlingly alive.

Also similar to the first book, alas, the plot itself and particularly the characters remain downright childish, evoking the unmistakable impression of a boyhood fantasy in the head of a nine-year-old sprawled on the floor, fighting battles with his toy knights and horses, albeit dressed in the vocabulary of a grown man. The main protagonist, Arn Magnusson of Arnäs, is so impossibly perfect that even Our Lord might cast a jealous glance his way. Arn, after all, speaks no fewer than four languages without an accent, is undefeatable in battle, possesses a mind that fathoms all mysteries, and foresees every manoeuvre of his foes with uncanny precision. He is a master not only of architecture, engineering, medicine, politics, and military strategy but of history, the Bible, and the Quran as well. His temper is a paragon of restraint (with one exception) and his honesty is as unwavering as his chastity as he remains devoted to Cecilia for two decades without so much as a flicker of romantic attraction to another woman, despite having known his fiancée only fleetingly as a teenager. In short, there is nothing Arn cannot achieve, nothing he does not know. He is not merely the finest warrior among the Knights Templar but, indeed, the finest human to have ever graced this earth. To the discerning adult reader, this portrait of a man, more suitable for a 1960s superhero comic than a historical novel at the dawn of the 21st century, might be either laughable or boring … or both.

Arn is hardly alone in his condition of implausibility. In Guillou's novels, the line dividing the virtuous from the villainous is typically drawn with the crystalline brightness of a child's crayon. The good are perfectly angelic, the wicked irredeemably diabolic, and never the two shall meet. In this moral landscape of stark absolutes, there is no room for the subtleties of human nature, no weaknesses, no flaws, no shades of grey to lend depth or credence to the characters.

All that being said, in our present age, where human wretchedness is celebrated, where theft, mendacity, treachery, pettiness, ignorance, and stupidity are hailed as virtues, and where the worst of our kind are exalted to rule, it can be liberating, if only for a moment, to dive into a world where integrity, compassion, and honour still carry weight. Guillou does not show us what humans are like. He shows us what they should be like. Thus, I find it hard to dismiss Guillou entirely as a mere purveyor of the banal. For while I am fully aware that the quality of this book is highly questionable, I cannot deny that a part of me looks forward to the third and final instalment of the trilogy with some anticipation.

I have, perchance, stumbled upon my guilty pleasure, my literary sanctuary if one will. But if that be the case, all of you who make up the society of today are to blame.