This is an extraordinary novel about two extraordinary women, the books they wrote and how those books survived. In 1934, while looking for a ping pong ball in the house of Lieutenant Colonel William Butler-Bowdon, a guest stumbled upon the only complete manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe. Butler-Bowdon threatened to throw it on the bonfire, saying “then we may be able to find ping pong balls and bats when we want them”. Fortunately he changed his mind, and the manuscript of the earliest English autobiography is now safely in the British Library.
Born in 1373, one-time brewer Margery Kempe had visions of Christ which set her off on a series of rambunctious, incident-packed pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Santiago de Compostela and Prussia. She dressed in white, like a virgin, despite having at least 14 children. She was tried for heresy several times but always managed to successfully rebut the charges. In her debut novel Victoria MacKenzie has distilled this chaotic, episodic rampage of a life into a beautifully lucid account of a spiritual adventure. The Margery who emerges is boastful, vulnerable, courageous, confused, mouthy, libidinous, attentive and impossible not to love.
But hers is not the only story. Margery’s wandering quest orbits a very still centre – the life of the anchorite Julian of Norwich, confined to a tiny cell and effectively living out her days in her own tomb. “A nun is a bride of Christ and so has a nuptial mass, but becoming an anchorite is a death. I had to die to the world.”
MacKenzie fully enters the mind of one who has chosen to see few things, but see them intensely. She writes about the tiny shifts of light: “Midwinter. Night crushes day between her fingers, squeezing the light out of her. A cold thin moon rises, a slip of paper between stars.” If MacKenzie distills Margery’s adventures to their essence, here she does the opposite, entering a body narrowly confined so that the soul and mind can play across a cosmic landscape, and opening up for us Julian’s giant intellect. This is a woman whose vision of a hazelnut that is “all there is” prefigured the big bang theory.
Much has been written about the two, but their choices are often dismissed as some kind of mental illness or a protest against the patriarchy. MacKenzie engages with them on their own terms, as two women trying to resolve the conflict between authority and experience. Each has had a vision – a “shewings”– that they burn to share. But they are living in a moment when any deviation from orthodoxy can provoke a terrible punishment. There’s one heartbreaking exchange between Julian and a visitor on the point of despair. She tries to reassure him that God loves him, but when he asks her how she knows, she cannot dare to tell the origin of her confidence – that she herself has “seen God in all things”. “I had food to offer,” she says, “but held back to protect myself.”
The novel unfolds against the backdrop of plague, revolt and the rise of the Lollards. This is a spare, uncluttered book, free of the Wikipedia bric-a-brac that often clogs up historical fiction, but you feel in every sentence the weight of history pressing down on and confining these women.
I said that Margery’s story orbits Julian’s, but it’s an orbit in fiery decay. The two lives eventually crash into each other in a sustained and beautiful dialogue that contains one electrifying moment of connection. The book ends with a twist that is as pleasing as it is surprising. This slim novel is a pocket epic; you will read it in no time but be thinking about it for ages after.
• For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain is published by Bloomsbury (£14.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
