THE VOYAGE OF THE SHORT SERPENT Featured in LA Times

In the Los Angeles Times "Discoveries" column, Susan Salter Reynolds takes note of The Voyage of the Short Serpent by Bernard du Boucheron, translated from the French by Hester Velmans: "The the cardinal-archbishop sends a fledgling Bishop on a mission to New Thule to save the colonists from heathendom: "You will ferret out and punish heresy, apostasy, infidelity, neglect of religious practice, perjury, gluttony, lusts both simple and sodomitic." But nothing prepares the bishop or his crew for the voyage through ice, the hunger that forces them to eat the corpses of their shipmates, the devastation and desperation they find. "To describe the poverty of these wretches is to wish to share it," the bishop reports back. And nothing prepares him for his own heresy. The settlers have mixed with the Inuit, and the bishop is hordfled by the local sexual practices — fornication in public, sharing of wives, trading of women for supplies. It is not long before he fathers a child (although he denies it) and is punished by the settlers for his hypocrisy. The Voyage ofthe Short Serpent is more than a story of survival in the frozen north; it's a parable on the perils of excessive morality, colonization and religious tyranny."