Medieval? Anything but (Part 1)

Mystery man and miracle worker, Gutenberg the hero of the Book, or at least the inventor of printing and so the herald of a non-violent revolution which truly changed the world, is a fascinating character. About 1455, he produced what later became known as the Gutenberg Bible, the first book to be printed from movable type. It was he who first used a press. So a novel based on the little-known details of his life and drawing on the wealth of fact and fiction about his medieval world should be intriguing.

Added to all this is Blake Morrison - a good writer, a talented poet as well as a responsible, honest journalist and the author of an honourable memoir about his father. If the culminative effect of that is not enough to send one racing out to acquire this novel, why, his publishers, clearly leaving no detail untouched, set out to confer an aura of the middle ages about the very physical presence of this well-designed book with its hint of a pastiche illuminated manuscript.

So far so good. The problem is that the novel is not good. It is not even goodish. Instead of deciding on a tone and pursuing that, Morrison allows his narrative, told in a jokey first person by old Johann himself - who is dictating his adventures to first one handsome young scribe and then another - to quickly degenerate into an unfunny burlesque. Very quickly the reader's teeth are set on edge. By page two Johann, making use of the printer's term "justification" - both as pun and as statement of intent - declares his intention of telling his story. "In other words, I plan to get it off my breast. To make a clean bosom of it. To wash my inky linen in public." Such modern usage feebly dressed in medieval pastiche is all very well should one be attempting Gutenberg's story Black Adder-style, but Morrison is not. Or at least, I don't think he is. Anyhow, as a novel it fails on so many counts that counting becomes academic - aside from the glaring weakness of the inconsistency of the voice created by Morrison's haphazard use of medieval pastiche and his apparent indecision about whether he should write a rollicking comedy or an historical novel. This is surely pretty fundamental and should have been decided before he began the book, not during the writing of it.

The characterisation is weak, the dialogue unconvincing, the setting messy. Gutenberg never emerges as anything and at all times, Morrison seems to abide by the dictum, "if in doubt, leave 'em laughing".

Well, it doesn't. As a reader with a particular interest in Gutenberg and medieval Germany I feel cheated. The truth is, an interest in medieval history is best served by historians and as for Gutenberg, there is the Kapr biography Morrison acknowledges. But a novelist can suceed in making history live within the frame of art, as John Banville so brilliantly does in Doctor Copernicus (1976) and Kepler (1981), both of which triumph as narrative while also evoking the chaotic medieval world of doubt, fear and discovery. Morrison's disappointing romp neither convinces nor entertains.

Eileen Battersby is the Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times