Ben Hopkins’s Cathedral

 

A Review of

Ben Hopkins’s Cathedral

Originally Published on the Online Version of the

Rain Taxi Review of Literature, Summer 2021

 

Cathedral
Ben Hopkins
Europa Editions, $26

 

In F for Fake, his fraudulent documentary about fraudulence in the art world, Orson Welles pauses in his descent into imposture to hold aloft Chartres Cathedral as perhaps the one true thing that our culture has created. It will be our legacy, he posits, and it will “testify to what we had it in us to accomplish.” Cannily, Welles fails to mention that the Gothic grandeur of Chartres was also founded upon an epic fraud, its majestic marshalling of spiritual and artistic and economic and political forces predicated on the absurd pretense that the pilgrimage site housed the tunic that Mary wore while birthing Jesus. Encompassing a labyrinth of these kinds of interconnected dreams and deceptions, screenwriter and filmmaker Ben Hopkins’s monumental debut novel, Cathedral, constructs an edifice whose design ranges from the most sublime heights of inspiration to the most degenerate political depths, with all of them counterbalancing each other and maintaining each other’s intricate facades.

Hopkins begins the novel with a bit of Wellesian legerdemain, enticing the reader into believing that this will be a kind of pilgrimage into artistic and spiritual fulfillment, with stock characters to root for and expect to develop, and the great trick is that these initial cliches are as enjoyable as they are blatantly dubious. There’s the visionary master-builder who’s visited the newly constructed Gothic cathedrals of medieval France and who’s been given charge of redesigning the cathedral of Hagenberg, a burgeoning city on the Rhine, in this soaring new style. Then there’s his callow disciple, who we expect to grow to self-realization and mastery of his own over the long course of the building’s bildung. Then there’s the master-builder’s outrageously idealized muse, an ethereal magician’s daughter whose beauty and purity stretch the reader’s credulity and patience. Countering these three, there’s the Bishop’s treasurer, a brilliantly Machiavellian schemer who holds the purse strings for the cathedral’s construction and who has no problem manufacturing heretics to squash in order to plunder their loot. In a traditional novel of this sort, he would be the dark underside of the matter that the author portrays as important and true, but in Hopkins’s medieval world of realpolitik, he and his kind are this novel’s true matter.

The nave of Chartres Cathedral

Rapidly subverting the agony-and-ecstasy cliches of the artistic Bildungsroman, Hopkins largely discards the idealistic cathedral theme and plunges the reader into the most brutally pragmatic political machinations, taking as much time and interest in teasing out the intricacies of the local clergy, nobles, merchants, and bureaucrats as he does in explicating the vast Papal and Imperial intrigues that keep the locals in constant adaptation and evolution. A truly Darwinian novel, Cathedral never remains static as its denizens build and rebuild the structures of their lives, both in competition and in symbiosis with each other. Alliances and friendships arise and fall and rise again in new forms as they balance and rebalance against all the other forces around them, the characters’ anthill associations scattering and regathering like a sped-up version of the incessantly redrawn and renegotiated plans for the cathedral, which despite everything continues its ascent.

Readers looking for medieval literature’s cathedral-like summa aesthetics—and ever-ascending spiritual edge-play—may be disappointed by this novel’s ultimately ghostless machine. A great Gothic cathedral is like the cosmos, with its every section and subsection forming itself into an ever-fractaling and ever-ornate atomic density. Visiting the lacy whorls of Strasbourg cathedral is like walking up to an enormous thumbprint that becomes more astoundingly elaborate with each step forward, as if you were gradually descending into an electron microscope. Hopkins’s novel is nothing like this. His prose isn’t at all lapidary, but instead rapid and vigorous, and you don’t pause on it in rapt wonder, but rather get swept along by its force. He has a powerful vocabulary, but his readers won’t get the easter-egg-hunt joy of searching the dictionary or internet five times a page to discover the names of clothes and carriage parts and architectural details that they’ll recognize from medieval paintings, as they do when reading Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. They also won’t find themselves immersed in a heady web of Scholastic theology, as in Henry Adams or Jorge Luis Borges or Umberto Eco. Nor will they encounter a penetrating exploration of the math that consumes some of the book’s characters, with the “sacred geometry” that undergirds the great Gothic cathedrals going completely unmentioned. Hopkins’s master is history, not aesthetics or metaphysics.

Ben Hopkins

As a screenwriter and filmmaker, Hopkins also employs far more filmic allusions than he does literary ones. He stonefacedly references Monty Python at two very unfunny moments, and he also makes a few glancing nods toward The Princess Bride, which was written by another great screenwriter/novelist, without ever alluding to that novel/film’s origins in Greek prose literature, particularly Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe. He does seem to echo some of Hugo’s celebrated “Feast of Fools” scene, but only in subject matter, not in language or method or aesthetic. Nicknaming his jejune stonecutter “Rettich” and placing great stress on the association with the word radish, Hopkins almost certainly invokes the celebrated Chartres scene in F for Fake, during which Welles mistily refers to the contemporary human as a “poor forked radish,” an allusion to Thomas Carlyle’s riff on Falstaff’s description of Robert Shallow in Henry IV, Part 2. It’s quite a thread of association from film to architecture to literature, and Hopkins dispenses with that thread on the novel’s first page. Otherwise largely literature free in its associative language and aesthetic order, this brilliantly imagined, gorgeously designed, and deeply profound novel is nonetheless a magnificent work of literature itself. It took Hopkins eight years to construct this extraordinary novel, and it will likely stand as his lasting legacy.

 

—David Wiley