The Relic Master

It took a full quarter of the book before I realized this was written by Christopher Buckley, not Christopher Moore. Moore is known for his genre/historical parodies - including one of my favorite books of all, Fool - while Buckley is better known for his political/modern satire. I count both Christophers among my favorite authors, but in this case the discovery that it was less than Moore caused me some grief.

Buckley can be funny - I'm just not sure why he chose not to be here. It felt like a first draft of a classic Moore, before the dialogue gets punched-up and the plots intricately woven together.

Perhaps it's unfair to compare, but I would in all earnestness urge you to read “Fool” if you're considering this. Then, if you're still looking for more, you can always swing back around to pick this up.

For all of the majesty and mystery and beauty of Catholicism there's a dark side to it, too. The Inquisitions. The long succession of shady popes in the Middle Ages. And the practice of selling indulgences, which was part of pushing Martin Luther over the edge enough to nail his 95 theses to the door of the church and kicked off the development of Protestantism. It is in those tumultuous times, literally right before immediately after Luther's action, where Christopher Buckley sets his The Relic Master. Indeed, Buckley places his protagonist, Dismis in the church where it happens as it happens. But this is not another The Name of the Rose, full of heady theological musings. It mines some similar territory about the nature of the Church, but it's at heart a comedy.

Dismis manages to find himself in that fateful church at that fateful time because he is a relic hunter: he scours fairs where bits of bodies and artifacts whose owners claim that they're connected to the saints are for sale to the highest bidder. Many, many of them are obvious fakery, but for the ones that seem to have some shred of authenticity, Dismas buys them for his patrons. Those patrons then use the relics to raise money for the church. Or more like “for the church”, as at least some of that funding gets diverted into the coffers of the church leaders themselves. This was a time when poverty as a godly virtue wasn't really a thing.

When Dismas finally decides it's time to get his life savings back from the banker he's been storing it with and retire, it's just in time to find out that banker has been arrested and put on trial for stealing his clients' money. Desperate, he and his good friend, the painter Albrecht Durer, conspire to forge perhaps the most famous relic in the world: the burial shroud of Jesus Christ. Dismas had long thought the shroud of Turin (known then as the shroud of Chambery because it lived in Chambery) was a fake, so he pretends to discover a new one, purporting to believe it is genuine. But the forgery is quickly discovered and Dismas' penance for his attempt to deceive is set: he has to go steal (or rather, relocate) the shroud of Chambery.

Accompanied by Durer, a handful of mercenary knights meant to keep him in line, and eventually Magda, a beautiful young woman they save from being tried as a witch, Dismas sets out for Chambery without much hope, or even a plan. From there there's a predictable romance and assorted hi-jinks, with lots of witty reparte and another set of potential thieves after the shroud to contend with. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but for me, it didn't have that spark that I need to be charmed by a comedy. Despite being humorous, I wouldn't call it an easy read: the plot is very twisty and the large cast of characters can be hard to keep track of. It requires enough concentration that it's not an easy plane/vacation read, but it's too light to be Serious Literature. It's an awkward in-betweeny space and it didn't quite work for me.

I would love to know what made Christopher Buckley think, “You know what the world needs? A satire about a Christian relic dealer in 1517...” I also wonder what would drive me to grab it (other than that's what I do every time I see his name – since the 80's). But I did, and I gave it the old college try.

The history is pretty good. But I wonder if I'm too critical, I've spent so much time recently listening to lectures, reading about, the religious atmosphere of the time – that might have hurt my appreciation for his take on the period (then again, most of his satire is contemporary and I lived through that without problems). In that light, I should say that I really appreciated his characterization of Johann Tetzel. But I just couldn't care about the characters, the story – any of it. There was none of Buckley's wit, or his voice – nothing that made me a fan of his other work. Honestly, I'm not sure how he could've kept those things with a historical fiction, but the book sure needed that. Yes, it's entirely possible, that if I'd stuck with it a bit longer, I'd have sung a different song, but life's too short and my TBR pile is too high.

So, for the first time since January 2011, I'm abandoning a book. I might come back to it at some point, I'd like to actually read it. But not now.

(not really a review, but I felt like I should say something)