• Paperback: 436 pages
• Publisher: Loyola Press (January 1, 2007)
• ISBN-10: 0829423524
• ISBN-13: 978-0829423525

reviewed by Debra Murphy

Originally published in 1956 by MacMillan, Son of Dust by Anglo-Catholic novelist Hilda Frances Margaret Prescott is a historical romance set in eleventh century Normandy shortly before “William the Conqueror”, Duke of Normandy, crossed the Channel to capture England in 1066.

The story is simple enough: Fulcun Geroy, a young and passionate and idealistic member of the landed gentry manages to resist one illicit sexual temptation only to be drawn into another and much more dangerous liaison with a married woman. And since this is a time when marriages were largely affairs of property and convenience, the reader can’t help but feel sympathy towards Fulcun and his star-crossed love–the more so since, as we come to see over the course of the novel, the relationship is not only based on lust but on respect and regard and, eventually, as the characters mature, caritas as well. Be that as it may, Prescott does not flinch from confronting both her characters and her readers with the collateral damage, personal and societal, attendant on the breaking of marital faith.

What separates Prescott’s historical romance from most of its genre kin is that it does not hew to the deliciously funny but terribly skewed interpretation of benighted “medieval” life offered up by the likes of (much as I love it) Monty Python and the Holy Grail—you know, the image, so hackneyed that it has itself become something of a joke, that life for most people in the so-called Age of Faith was nasty, brutish, short, and above all, priest-ridden and superstitious. Indeed, though Prescott does not hesitate to show us ill-educated and morally lax clergy here and there, her sketch of the eleventh century world as coherent and civilized, for all its simplicity, anticipated the revolution in historical thinking that has occurred in the last few decades as the result of the pioneering work of scholars such as Eamon Duffy, whose research into the everyday life of townspeople in late medieval England revealed a commonal way of life far removed from the beastly existence depicted as a staple of secular historiography ever since the publication of Gibbon’s anti-Catholic masterpiece, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Moreover, and in keeping with Prescott’s sketching of medieval life as both civilized and religious,hofwever flawed, her hero, Fulcun Geroy, is not only strong and brave but–quelle surprise!–a believer; a conscientious child of the Church who knows full well that his lust is wrong, struggles against it, and even as he fails, does not forget entirely that God is merciful and that he must change his life.

In terms of literary value, Son of Dust may not be in the first rank of Catholic novels, but it is a solidly structured and largely very well written story. Prescott’s “action” scenes were sometimes a little confusing to me, and I occasionally found myself thinking, what just happened? Nor did I react well to her habit, much as I love epigraphs, of setting off her eleventh century chapters with anachronistic quotes gleaned from  sixteenth century Shakespeare and obscure twentieth century poets; it tended to lift me right out of the book.

But Prescott makes up for these little narrative wobbles, for this writer/reader at least, with passages of remarkable lyrical beauty, such as this one:

He did not, it is true, think of her—she was a blank patch in the picture in his mind. He thought instead of riding out to hunt (having said good-bye to her), on autumn mornings when the bracken was on fire, and the milk-white, slim trunks of the birch trees were warmed to a faint rose by the sun that shone through their showering red-gold leaves; mornings when the deer went by with the sunlight and soft leaf shadows rippling over them like moving water gleams, and the horns blew up clear, with a merry noise, in the sharp, shining, blue air.

Wow.

For Catholic fans of historical romance who have a hard time finding anything out there that doesn’t insult either their intelligence or their faith, H.F.M. Prescott’s Son of Dust may prove just the book they’re looking for.