"Patrick" -- A Book Review

Some of you may be familiar with the author Stephen Lawhead, probably most well-known for his Pendragon Cycle. I read the entire thing and for the most part, it was quality reading, at least in terms of fantasy fiction.

I was especially impressed by how well the church was treated -- it was a while ago that I last read them, but I remember nothing but respectful approaches to monks and other religious figures who were almost uniformly good guys.

Prior to Patrick, the only other Lawhead book I'd read was Byzantium, which likewise started off well regarding religious figures (the main character is an Irish monk who leaves his monastery on a journey with his superiors), although part of the way through I got a vague sense that Lawhead was perhaps not a fan of "the Church" so much as he was of Christianity. Still, there was nothing pervasively offensive, and it was a decent read (Lawhead is also the author of a trilogy on the Crusades, but I haven't read it and can't comment on his religious sensibilities regarding those books or the historical events).

Apart from any religious aspect, Lawhead is really very good at his early social history, painting what seems like an accurate picture of what life may have been like, and also seemed to have his historical trappings well-researched. In short, it felt very much like you were where the story was taking place.

The only thing I've ever discovered to be anachronistic about Lawhead's work in general is the attitudes he gives to his main characters -- quite a few are either very modern in their sensibilities (although their ideas are still couched in a generic kind of archaic "history-speak"), or come off like how a fan of the New Age would render the thoughts of characters who happened to be Druids, or supposed Wizards (like Merlin, for example), or whatever. It was easy to excuse these departures as done for the sake of a modern readership, though, so it really wasn't a problem.

I was interested to see, then, how Lawhead would handle the story of St. Patrick. Unfortunately everything that didn't go wrong before was glaringly problematic this time, and everything that wasn't quite right before got worse.

In particular, Lawhead demonstrates almost a hatred for the traditional church. I'm not sure whether this attitude was adopted since his previous writings or whether he held them but they never came out in his writing. It seems more like the former, because he had ample opportunity in those earlier writings to villify the church and didn't really take them.

This time, though, he goes overboard, which is especially inappropriate in a book about a saint.

Essentially, the last half of the book ends up being an attempt at historically rehabilitating the heretic Pelagius, making him the good guy against those stodgy, self-absorbed priests of modern liberal (and angry Protestant) legend. It's all the more shameful because the first half of the book really is a good read, although my first clue-in that something was wrong came when there was a more-or-less graphic sex scene early on. It was unexpected, but when you find something like that it's easy enough to pass over if you can safely assume it would be the only one.

It wasn't. In fact, all the others involved Patrick himself fornicating with a woman he barely knew. She ends up being the main "girl interest" in the book, but the fornication continues when Patrick leaves her for a time and eventually finds another girl. The whole idea of giving a churchman a wife and son, although certainly not unknown or even necessarily looked down on back in those days, seems a particular anachronism the way it's treated here. And of course when Patrick eventually repudiates his past bad behavior, not a word is wasted in questioning whether premarital relations should parhaps be repudiated as well.

What little we know of St. Patrick includes nothing like this. In fact there's very little of what we know in here at all, other than that Patrick was captured by the Irish, enslaved, and forced to be a shepherd for years. But instead of saying hundreds of prayers a day, as Patrick himself tells us happened in real life, this fictional Patrick spends the time alternately learning Irish, laying around bored, or fornicating.

What an inspiration.

The anti-Catholic interpretation isn't the only difficulty; Lawhead also has a soft spot for druidism that gets in the way here. It isn't usually a problem in his other works, as pretty much every time he has a subplot about how the druids recognize the truth of Christianity and more or less incorporate it to varying degrees in their religious practice. As Lawhead presents the druids, they aren't really a problem for a Christian reader -- Lawhead's druids are basically scientists, naturalists, and doctors. In the case of Merlin in the Pendragon Cycle it was easy enough to accept some mysticism, since after all it was a fantasy story tinged with history.

This time around though it was a historical novel that inexplicably had bits of weird fantasy tied to it, for no good reason. The druids here make use of Power Words, which would be fine alongside Christianity if such powers were presented as a fantasy, where we are to suspend disbelief about things like native magic. In Patrick, though, the druidical powers, no matter how muted in use, stick out like a sore thumb and ultimately detract. Lawhead didn't see the need to include things like this in Byzantium, so I don't know why he did it here.

A particular weakness of all Lawhead's writing is that after a time he becomes predictible within his own works. He has some original ideas, but he reuses the same ideas for each story. By this time they were easy to spot, and besides were particulary unsatisfying. In fact there is one Deus Ex Machina scene, involving the climax of all things, that destroys any virtue the read had up until that point.

Finally, Lawhead drops the ball in plot choice. This reads less like historical fantasy and more like a Harlequinn novel from a man's perspective. And in fact, all Lawhead's male main characters are so sympathetic and wise as to verge on overly sensitive. At least characters in previous novels were still manly; here Patrick, while not effeminate in any way, nonetheless doesn't demonstrate much in the way of manly virtue, at least not until the very end. To some degree that seems to be the point, but it contrasts poorly to all the romance novel conventions Lawhead applies to other parts of the plot.

The story also ends when Patrick returns to Ireland to convert the Irish over to his brand of druidic quasi-Christianity, which Lawhead has him spout. In that light all that Patrick says about Christ comes off as mere relgious platitudes, afterthoughts that have no real power or meaning to the story or the character.

Prior to this novel I assumed Lawhead was a serviceable writer and a historically knowledgeable well-meaning Christian; perhaps he was, or still is but really, really hates Catholicism. Whatever his motivations, Patrick starts with promise but soon devolves into a poorly-crafted waste of time.