MATRIX – LAUREN GROFF – REVIEW

Sometimes historical novels dig up events so clearly dramatic and well preserved, it is as if the writer were an archaeologist discovering a fully preserved treasure trove. Plot unfolds, fires are started and put out, heroes and villains leap from history, and it is not hard to see where a novelist found their inspiration. The characters have either long been heroes, or have lived lives so dramatic it is as if they were created especially for novelisation. Other books dig deeper, finding a fragment of a minor player and taking an excavation brush to their lost story. Matrix, by Lauren Groff, is firmly in the latter field.

Taking the little known and much occluded story of the poet Marie de France as inspiration, Groff installs Marie as the new prioress of a starving, diseased 12th Century monastery in relentlessly grey England. Groff’s Marie is not, at least initially, a devout woman, but rather a lovesick teenager hoping to win a reprieve from the nunnery and the impossible love of the Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Painstakingly, often literally, and slowly, Marie will turn the nunnery around, learning to lead the women, secure her position, raise revenues, and fight back against those who would do her community harm. Here is a titan who will be the rock on which her abbey grows, someone adept at harnessing the strengths of her flock.

In her prioritisation of the human over the divine, the shielding of her sisters from papal interdicts, she is something of a literary cousin to the Prior Philip of Kingsbridge. Most particularly, the link is present in her relentless pride, something to be both celebrated and censured, for as she builds up her Abbey, Marie will struggle, above all with the question of whether she acts for the good of the abbey or the good of Marie. But Marie is a more cynical, more physical character than Ken Follett’s priest. She ruthlessly undermines an upstart rival, and, for all that readers might expect a book about a nunnery to be fairly bloodless fare, Matrix is a visceral, at times brutal, read. The crusading trope of the warrior priest gets a female version here, big boned Marie as much Lord as Lady. Nor does the book shy away from depicting physical love. Marie the Abbess has long harboured an unrequited love of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. She will find physical comforts from some of her sister nuns. Matrix is, at its core, a book about love, in all its languages. As a nun, Marie will do more than her share of acts of service, some more literal than others. She will try the gift of her poetry to win Queen Eleanor, so fond of courtly love. She speaks words of affirmation to her charges. She devotes her time to love of her community and her God. One of the more touching moments shows her canny realisation, and use of subprioress Goda’s longing for platonic touch.

For all its human struggles, the power of God and his servants is a constant refrain. As for Marie herself, her visions are the subject of much speculation. Are they truly divine, or cunningly crafted justifications of practical plans that her mind births and which grow the strength and prestige of the Abbey? Does it matter?

At one point Marie’s nuns begin construction of a labyrinth to guard the entrance to the nunnery. These are women walling themselves off from the world, making themselves as unknowable as God, except within the confines of their community.

The book itself has its moments of unknowability. The dream sequences border on the psychadelic. Description is regularly lush, vivid, and sensuous. All speech is reported. In the hands of a less skilled author it wouldn’t work. But Groff’s prose is at once so rich and so down to earth that she pulls it off. This book is scented with mass, but also with warm milk fresh from the heifers, with the apricot tree Marie watches flower, with the splash of blood of a severed head.

And, slowly but surely, as the hours and the works go on, Matrix sucks you into its portrait of ambition, into its beautiful brutality, into Marie’s troubled life. It is, despite its setting, a hymn to the human as much as, if not more than, the divine, and, as a novel, it is both of those things.