My pick for the Samuel Richardson Award finalist
A Flight of Saints by Elizabeth Braithwaite
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Over the summer, I agreed to be a judge for the inaugural Samuel Richardson Self-Published Fiction Prize, organized by the grande dame of Substack letters, Naomi Kanakia herself. The name of the prize is self-explanatory. Authors were invited to submit their own self-published novels, which would be evenly distributed to a panel of judges. The goal is simply to highlight work that would likely go unrecognized otherwise, and hopefully steer some readers toward worthy books.
I am not alone among the other judges when I say that I expected the books to lean toward the experimental, the envelope-pushing, the avant-garde. Isn’t that what self-publishing is for? To distribute works too strange for the publishing industry? And there were a couple books that lived up to such expectations. Yet I was surprised to find that the book I responded to most positively was, in a way, downright traditional. The book I selected is not a polyphonous cacophony of competing narrators attempting to describe a strange environment. It is the story of a young woman going on a journey with several companions—a timeworn story almost mythic in its resonance.
Nuns on the Run
The book I chose is A Flight of Saints by Elizabeth Braithwaite. A Flight of Saints is the story of Sister Lucia, a young nun living in a convent in Northern Italy, in the year 1179. The convent was once a place of peace and purpose for Lucia, looked over by a benevolent abbess she adored. But a power struggle is taking place within the church at the time, and the abbess is forced out. The new abbess, Mother Clothidle, is cruel and harsh, so much so that Lucia forms a plan to escape the convent and travel to Bingen, where the beloved and saintly Hildegard ministers. A long and treacherous journey through the Alps.
Lucia does not make the journey alone. Four companions join her, also sisters fleeing the cruelties of Mother Clothilde. Val, stern and practical; Gretchen, who evinces a rather un-sisterly interest in the mysteries of human sexuality; Mea, aloof and proud, with a strange secret in her past; and Fey, a naive young woman who evinces the mark of the stigmata—and which Lucia suspects she is faking.
If you are thinking that sounds kind of like the hobbits from The Lord of the Rings trudging across Middle-Earth, you’re not far off.
Lucia tells the story of their journey in what one could call retrospective first-person, meaning that she is looking back on her story from some point in the future. Her voice is clear, personable and often striking:
An empty belly made me think that God had forsaken me; a full one made me think God cared for me. What was this backward theology that glorified penury? Abundance did not weaken devotion to God; surely it strengthened it. For what was poverty but a sign of neglect and abandonment?
One Foot in Front of the Other
I am, I have discovered, a rather gullible reader. I never see plot twists coming. I can never tell who the real killer is until the very last page. Thus, I found myself gasping when the story reveals one of its secrets about 50 pages in. Mea, the aloof one, is aloof for good reason. She is not a peasant girl who made her way to the church for spiritual purposes. She is a duchess from a powerful family, betrothed the son of another powerful family. When he tried to mistreat her, though, she killed him, forcing her family to hide her away in the convent.
“Mea is royalty?????” I wrote on my Kindle. Like I said: gullible.
Having finished the book, though, I can see this as a means of giving each character a distinct personality, allowing the reader to distinguish one from another. It is not unlike a television show, come to think of it. Indeed, Braithwaite compares the book to Derry Girls on her website, another story about very teenage girls in a religious setting.
This is not without its shortcomings. That very sturdiness does make it predictable at certain points, even for a gullible reader like myself. The sturdy sister finds a caring man, the shy girl proves demonstrative. Near the end, perhaps as a means of evading that sense of predictability, an instance of sexual violence occurs, seemingly out of nowhere. It is abrupt and jarring, though it is described in minimal terms. Certainly not enough to derail the story as a whole. But it felt like an instance of the story trying to reach a level that doesn’t necessarily fit into its world.
When I read that Lucia’s destination is none other than Hildegard of Bingen, I was hopeful that it might contain some rumination on her mystical thought, which is beautiful and strange. Hildegard herself, though, plays hardly any role other than a simple destination. That felt like a missed opportunity, as that could have portrayed the strange beauty of the medieval experience more fully.
Still, A Flight of Saints is an entertaining and engaging book, and I can easily recommend it to readers looking for an earthy story of strangely familiar characters on a journey of mythic resonance.
Be sure to read the entries from all the other judges!