BOTTOM SHELF 5

Our fledgling book club held its first meeting recently, on a February afternoon that had all the qualities of April at its best. Daffodils under the hedge, a woodpecker drilling in the pear tree, sunshine flooding the drinks tray and revealing my bad housekeeping, and a not-really-necessary fire in front of which the dogs barked in their sleep. We had been reading a blockbuster. I'm not going to tell you its title, since what I am about to say is probably libellous. Just to say it consists of 700 pages of ill-digested research, woodenly written, peopled with cardboard characters, dotted with banalities; we all felt we had wasted our time in reading it, except the chooser of the book and one other who had been flicking through it on a sunny beach somewhere, when any book can seem better than it is. We felt especially aggrieved that we had been conned into paying good money for such dross, by the publishers' nerve in flooding bookshops and bombarding critics with what is nothing more than an ego-trip with cynical pretensions to be literature. It's only good quality was that it had prompted us to go and find other books on the purported subject of the book - the Fourth Crusade and the persecution of the Cathars.

On my own bottom shelf I found Zoé Oldenbourg's novel The Cornerstone, published in England in 1954, and in France a year earlier as La Pierre Angulaire. It tells the stories of three generations of the same family, at the time of the Crusades, around the town of Troyes. The old man, a retired crusader, sets out to make a final pilgrimage to the Holy Land; his son, a philandering baron, is finally punished for his sins, and his grandson plays out in full the bizarre and unrequited rituals of courtly love. Each scene is like a detailed illustration from a book of hours - here is the swineherd, deep in the woods, who is married unceremoniously to a girl of good birth in order to punish her. Here is the lady in her garden of flowers being worshipped from afar by her knight. A woman perceived to be a witch is stoned to death. The writing is robust and unsentimental, the brutalities of the age are unflinchingly described but not gratuitous - they are necessary to build up this most perceptive picture of medieval France. The author had mastered her scholarship and woven it seamlessly into a story of excitement and terror and love. That is not so with the potboiler we had just been reading. Here the weaving of research with story is far from seamless. At times it is not sustainable and so the author reverts to the present day, a clunky device, to say the least. Of the two, I know which I would take to my desert island - and it is almost 150 pages shorter, too.

Simone Sekers.