By David Flusfeder
4th Estate, £14.99
There can't be too many Jewish reviewers as acquainted as I am with the 13th-century Franciscan friars who people David Flusfeder's book. You were perhaps studying Torah at Limmud while I notionally embarked on a medieval road trip (from Oxford to Viterbo) with John the Pupil, his two pilgrim sidekicks and a precious package for the Pope.
Medieval monasticism was my special subject at A-level history. I was a maven of Cistercian plain-chant and St Bernard of Clairvaux appeared in my dreams. So I recognised this tonsured travelogue as underpinned by scholarly research, albeit leavened by its Jewish author's hallmark bitter-herb, black humour.
John is a village boy, hand-plucked for education by Roger Bacon, real-life friar, scientist and philosopher. Bacon studied optics, knew something of gunpowder and had dreamed up the "ornithopter", a wing-flapping fight-machine, 200 years before Da Vinci was born. These ideas and experiments he distilled in an opus majus which, with one or two other treasures, he entrusts to John for safe and secret delivery to Clement IV.
Flusfeder's richly imagined journey (of 1267) seems part-penance and hell on earth for the entirely holy trio who are robbed, beaten and set upon.
It is leavened by Flusfeder's bitter-herb black humour
They are pursued through France by Simeon the Palmer, who makes his living by a kind of early concierge service for sinners - undertaking pilgrimage on behalf of rich men who would rather pay than risk the trip themselves.
The near-heavenly rewards of John's journey, however, range from roisterous taverns to natural wonders and a fresh take on sin, offered him by a free-thinking alpine girl. There's also a charmed interlude in which the trio are taken in by rich and worldly patrons of the poet Dante, who, shockingly for the times, believe that there is no life after death. Here, John encounters his first Jew and finds that, apart from the tribal cap, there is nothing monstrous to mark the man out as different from the Roman cardinal or Venetian banker with whom he was conversing.
The ongoing cliffhanger is whether even a shred of the prized cargo will survive multiple mishaps to reach the Pope and, if so, how His Holiness might receive it. The puzzle for me, however, was quite why Flusfeder chose to recreate this particular religious journey when, in the very same year, he could have followed the Ramban from Aragon to Jerusalem to build the great synagogue. Serendipity, it turns out, set Flusfeder reaching for Rome: researching bomb-making for an entirely different book, he happened upon the link between gunpowder and Bacon - and was hooked. Flusfeder followed John's 35-mile-a-day footsteps. Car and train took some of the strain, but Flusfeder says he finished writing before his feet recovered.
Madeleine Kingsley is a freelance reviewer