Ritual & Chivalry: Peter Vansittart's 'The Lost Lands'

  

 In a copy of Peter Vansittart’s The Lost Lands (1964), loosely enclosed, there is a letter from the historian Peter Green:

 “I read you novel in TS [typescript] before I left the Bodley Head, & did an immensely enthusiastic report on it, entre nous: but seriously, an extraordinary tour-de-force I think, & the atmosphere of decaying, plague-ridden, obsolescent ritual & chivalry as good as anything Charles Williams ever did—flavour rather the same too.” (Peter Green, letter to Peter Vansittart, 29^th December 1957, from Lyn Cottage, Harlton, Nr Cambridge).

Green was himself a historical novelist, of the classical period, the author of Achilles His Armour (1955) and The Sword of Pleasure (1957), and was also a leading biographer of Kenneth Grahame.

Williams did not write historical novels, but most of his plays are historical. Green may have had these in mind as to theme, and the novels as to atmosphere. It is an unusual perspective, but I think I can sense what he means, and it is an approach worth further exploration. I don’t think I asked Peter in our several meetings whether he had read Williams, but I think it likely he might at least have read the Grail novel War in Heaven, since he also wrote on Arthurian themes and was knowledgeable of the earlier fiction in this field. Charles Williams, of course, intentionally wrote fiction in the thriller form, inspired by Sax Rohmer, whereas Vansittart’s novels could not be further from this style.

The Lost Lands was the first book by Peter Vansittart I discovered, in Northampton public library, and I was entranced. I had never read anything remotely like it. I found it glimmering with precise, iridescent detail, and also oblique in technique and frankly sometimes baffling, in the sense that I did not quite know what was going on. The reader has to infer a lot, but I did not mind that. It was because of this find that I looked out for the author’s other books and eventually wrote to him, and then wrote about his work in several essays.

The publisher lauds Vansittart’s “uncanny ability to recreate not only the external features of periods remote from us in time, but their intellectual and emotional climates as well.” His success as a historical novelist was that he did not depict ‘ourselves in fancy dress’, but imagined deeply how people of the time would think, and what myths, beliefs, superstitions and rumours shaped their lives. This was his third major historical novel, starting with The Tournament (1961), which won high critical acclaim and became a sort of signature novel of his, and followed by The Friends of God (1963).

The Lost Lands is set in a 13^th century province in the marcher land between France, Burgundy and what is left of the Holy Roman Empire. Here, the Count must preserve the independence of his land in uneasy balance with these powers, the Bishop, the Dominicans and their Inquisition, and the increasingly powerful Knights Templar. The conventional faith operates alongside popular folklore, irrational, primitive, often brutal, obsessed by ritual, still semi-pagan. And some aristocrats, courtiers and scholars are drawn to a clandestine dualist faith, perhaps of Persian origin, which sees the world governed by two equal competing divine powers, neither necessarily all good or all evil. It seems to them a truer explanation of their everyday experience, in a time of war, plague, cruelty and corruption.

The novel includes richly detailed chapters on the rituals and mysticism of the Templars. While it is also clear-eyed about their ruthlessness and lust for power, Vansittart is adept at imagining the inner world of a Templar Grand Prior influenced by faiths encountered in the Crusades: Gnostic, Neoplatonist, Ishmaelite and Kabbalistic. 

There is a sort of psychic lineage here with the 20^th century dark magicians, occultists and visionaries in Charles Williams’ metaphysical thrillers, who invoke esoteric symbolic systems such as the Grail mythos, the Tarot, Alchemy and the Platonic Images. Both authors depict the strong allure and the spiritual perils of such paths, but in both cases this is also set within a fully worldly context: The Lost Lands moves among high figures of state and church, just as Williams relished including eminences of state and church in his thrillers.

Ultimately, a historical novel seems to me a different sort of beast to the metaphysical thrillers of the Twenties and Thirties with a contemporary setting, but Green’s insight into some shared timeless aspects in the work of of Vansittart and Williams is still worthwhile.

The Lost Lands, like many of Peter’s novels, is hard to find. Slightly easier is The Tournament and that will give a flavour of his style, his flair for strange imagery, and his immense learning in recondite byways.

(Mark Valentine)