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."

THE VOYAGE OF THE SHORT SERPENT in KIRKUS

Check out what Publishers Weekly has to say about The Voyage of the Short Serpent by Bernard du Bucheron, due out in January 2oo8.

"A spare, cunningly ironic novel set in the wilds of medieval Iceland.

While Iceland has been nominally Christianized, hibernal adversity and distance from the mainland have conspired to turn the native population toward a more primitive, primeval (read "debauched, pagan") existence. The novel begins with an archbishop's official directive to Bishop Insulomontanus in which he lays out what the bishop must do: to "investigate the Christian folk…and to offer them the comfort of the Word, while not neglecting to castigate sin, if need be, by sword or by fire." The bishop takes this advice literally, and much of the rest of the novel consists of his report back to the archbishop about what he has done to reassert Christian order and hegemony. After an arduous journey through ice and snow, the bishop arrives at Gardar in New Thule to discover ten recently slaughtered corpses. The local chieftain, Einar Sokkason, is of no help, nor is the one remaining priest, a "porcine monster" living openly with a "scarce-pubescent female." The bishop wastes no time with his first decision: to have the priest burned at the stake for "heresy, apostasy, sacrilege and sodomy." In his continual struggle against heresy amongst these primordial people, the bishop resorts to increasingly desperate and even sadistic strategies to maintain his ecclesiastical authority, including having ears torn off and eyes gouged out as punishment for apostates. (He also resorts to beheading, which, considering the alternatives, is something of a blessing.) Eventually the bishop develops a sexual relationship with a local woman, Avarana, although he disingenuously hints in his report to the archbishop that she is a liar and thus not to be trusted. The occasional intervention of a third-person narrative puts the bishop's growing derangement and hypocrisy into perspective.

Sparse, rawboned and fascinating."