A book about the creation of the King James bible in 17th-century England is an unlikely delight. Its author, Adam Nicholson, talks to Arminta Wallace.
Every so often a non-fiction book comes along which, though dedicated to a topic so obscure it promises to interest nobody, turns out to be of interest to just about everybody. Remember Dava Sobel's study of maritime techno- wizardry and astronomical infighting, Longitude? So compelling, it had people who wouldn't know a meridian from a marimba scuttling off to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich to peer, awestruck, at a series of 16th-century timepieces, it defied categorisation and became an improbable bestseller. This week sees the publication of Power and Glory, a warts-and-all recreation of Jacobean England and its greatest artistic achievement, the 1611 version of the Bible named after King James I, which may well do for the latter what Longitude did for John Harrison and his clocks.
If God is in the details, just about every page of this book is divine. Royal gossip, political manoeuvring, interdenominational bickering - it's all here, polished off with a fine glaze of irony. "The government habitually tortured and executed people and displayed their heads (hard-boiled, so that the skin went black and had some resistance to the weather) on spikes at the south end of London Bridge . . ."
But why would a journalist and travel writer want to write a book on this particular subject?
"In 1999 I was writing a book for the government about the Dome," explains author Adam Nicholson, "which, as you will remember, was a state enterprise intended to encapsulate everything that was good about the country, provide a national focus for the Millennium and all of that. And as the world knows, it went disastrously wrong.
"At the time, a friend of mine said to me, 'You know, the book you should really be writing is how they came to do the King James Bible - it was also a great big government project which was very tightly controlled and involved a huge number of players, yet the thing that they produced has been one of the greatest of all books. How did that work, when the Dome was such a catastrophe?' That was the seed of it. And then the first decade of the 17th century is an incredibly interesting little moment of English history - extraordinarily rich in lots of ways. It always seems interesting, to me, to write about a big topic like that through one little window."
Nicholson insists that he embarked on Power and Glory knowing absolutely nothing about 17th-century history - and nothing about the Bible. Having graduated from Cambridge with a degree in English, he spent almost a decade travelling in England, Europe and the US, "writing books about long walks in the mountains and stuff".
After a spell in publishing, he settled down to books and journalism, and now has a regular slot in the Daily Telegraph.
"My previous book was about three tiny islands in the Hebrides - or, in fact, not about those three islands, but about the evolving relationship of people and nature. At the moment I'm sailing around the west coast of Britain and Ireland, writing about - well, it's difficult to talk about these things before you've actually written them, but it's about where we meet the sea, and what happens to people's lives when the sea dominates them. It's really an excuse for an outing. I'm having the time of my life." The research needed for Power and Glory was pretty stern stuff. "I had to try and understand the world of Bible scholarship, and the Bible is just vastly written about, as you can imagine; then I had to try and understand early 17th-century history, which is an absolute battlefield of competing versions of what was and was not going on; and finally, I had to try and understand what translations are, how they work, and what the evolving image of a good translation has been over the centuries."
Nicholson found much of the information in specialist journals and arcane books: "if you squeeze the libraries", he confesses cheerfully, "the juice drips out the bottom." Jacobean England was, in some ways, an oddly modern place. Golf was introduced in 1608; the following year, the first shopping mall appeared on the Strand in London, stuffed to the doors with Venetian glass, Chinese silks, Turkish carpets and trinkets from the New World. The hard-boiled heads on London Bridge, however, were a reminder that the bloody interdenominational conflicts of Tudor days still lurked close to the surface. Religion was at the centre of cultural life in a way that now seems inexplicably alien. Catholicism was outlawed and - the 1605 Guy Fawkes fiasco notwithstanding - largely out of sight, but a propaganda war was still being waged between the fledgling Church of England and the Puritans, who were outraged by such "popish practices" as the use of the cross as a symbol and the act of kneeling to receive communion, and rendered practically apoplectic by the existence of bishops.
In a society in which the majority of the population was illiterate and received its spiritual sustenance orally, in church, the text of the Bible was an obvious battleground. The officially approved version was the Bishops' Bible; translated in 1568, it was royalist to the eyeballs, and the Puritans hated it, preferring the translation made in Geneva, the headquarters of Calvinism, in the 1550s.
Royalists could hardly be expected to accept the latter, but the Bishops' Bible was clumpy and pompous, sometimes to the point of hilarity. "Famously," writes Nicholson, "instead of 'Cast thy bread upon the waters', the bishops had written, 'Lay thy bread upon wet faces'." James's decision to fund a new translation was an attempt to heal these divisions and provide "one only translation of ye byble to be authenticall and read in ye churche" - a political, not an aesthetic, undertaking.
As Nicholson points out, however, the miracle took place in the making. The James Bible is a masterpiece of English literature, its rhythms woven into the very fibre of the language, its best-known passages hugely influential on centuries of subsequent writing.
And the astonishing thing is that not only did this book emerge from what was undoubtedly a corrupt administration, but the translation itself was made by a motley crew of hastily-assembled civil servants, many of whom were muddled, drunk, ruthless and self-serving - at least as Nicholson portrays them. "Well, you know, a lot of them were rather boring," he admits. "So I jumped on the good stories. When I found a drunk or a pornographer I said, 'Yeah, I'll have them, thanks very much'.
There were actually 50 translators altogether, so if I had ushered them all on stage it would have been like a scene from Les Misérables, a vast chaos with everyone singing and shouting. So I reduced it to about a dozen key players, and concentrated on them." And an extraordinary bunch of disciples they were, too: Lancelot Andrewes, who prayed for five hours every morning, often weeping as he did so; Richard Thomson, who "seldom went one night to bed sober"; George Abbot, a sort of 17th-century Bill Bryson, author of a bestseller modestly entitled A briefe Description of the whole worlde. For Nicholson, however, the most extraordinary discovery of all was that of the state - or the state-sponsored committee - as creator of a spectacularly artistic work of art.
"Nowadays the association of the state and literature is conceived of as dead in the water from the start, isn't it? We'd never imagine that the state is going to produce anything very good - and not even through one governing hero, like Elizabeth I, say, but through a committee of almost totally anonymous apparatchiks. For me personally, one of the reasons I'm very glad to have done this book is that I now have this other model of how creativity might work.
Because although the thing they made is incredibly beautiful, it is also meticulously attentive to the sense that they're trying to transmit. They didn't want to make something new: they wanted to make something perfectly old. They wanted to give it without changing it. These are all very alien concepts to the post-romantic way of thinking. It's the non-egotistical sublime."
Sublime is certainly the word for the James Bible's rendering of the opening sentences of Genesis; Nicholson's word-by-word analysis of these, and his comparisons with earlier and later versions of the text, will delight readers of a literary critical bent. "And the earth was without form, and voyd, and darknesse was vpon the face of the deepe: and the Spirit of God mooued vpon the face of the waters . . ." The phrase "face of the waters", he writes, "carries a subliminal suggestion that the face of God is reflected in them . . . a scene from Michelangelo or Blake . . ." He is considerably less enthusiastic about the New English Bible, which dates from 1970, which he castigates for its "dreariness" and "banality". But wasn't that its selling point - plain English? Is Nicholson actually suggesting that the simplicity of modern translations has, rather than attracting people to organised religion, driven them away in droves? "I'm sure," he says cautiously, straddling the fence as neatly as any Jacobean politician, "it's a dialogue between the two things. If the energy has in some ways drained out of organised religion, the form of its Bible is going to be impoverished by that. I was talking to Richard Holloway, who used to be the bishop of Edinburgh, about this the other day, and he said that a lot of 20th-century translations headed off down the plain accessibility track, because that's what people in the 20th century, dissatisfied with 19th-century myth and magic, believed religion to be good for. Whereas what's really needed from religion is the inaccessible mystery - the thing you can never quite put your finger on. That's where its power lies.
"The James Bible knows in its gut about the value of obscurity and richness and suggestion. If you cut those out, you're not shearing away the unnecessary excrescences. You're actually cauterising the heart of it."
Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the making of the King James Bible, by Adam Nicholson, is published by HarperCollins at £18.99 in UK