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Mystery and Tragedy
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18235 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1990 |
2,048 Words |
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Clyde Wilson
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ENTERED FROM THE SUN
George Garrett
Net York: Doubleday, 1990
$19.95
It would not be entirely wrong, I suppose, to describe George Garrett's most recent novel as a murder mystery or detective thriller, for the investigation of a violent death (that of the poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe in 1593) is the focus of the plot of Entered From the Sun. However, that description would be a little like saying that Moby Dick is a story about a boat trip or that King Lear is about the hardships of old age before Social Security.
In Entered From the Sun Garrett continues the stunning fictional exploration of Elizabethan England begun in his Death of the Fox (1971) and continued in The Succession (1983). Death of the Fox tells of the downfall and execution of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1618, and The Succession centers on the rise of James I to the English throne in 1603. Entered From the Sun, though published last, precedes the other two books chronologically. In the trilogy, it is kindred and distinct performance, yet a prologue rather than an equal partner, because Entered From the Sun is shorter and of lesser historical scope than the other two.
Garrett's Elizabethan novels have, unexpectedly, breathed new life into what many thought of as the exhausted and trivialized genre of the historical novel by bringing vividly home to a modern audience one of the great ages. Elizabethan England saw, with respect to literature, statecraft, religion, and the embrace of the terrible burden of freedom for the individual human conscience, the birth of the modern world, or at least that part of it made up by the English-speaking peoples. (Though Garrett does not make a point of this, it was in addition the age of the births of Virginia and Massachusetts and thus of the United States, so that the author has made a profound though indirect contribution to under standing of American history.)
But this does not exhaust what Garrett has done in these books. He has not only recovered the historical age at the core of the modern English-speaking world. He has also, this time through the emblematic mystery of Christopher Marlowe, plumbed the even greater mystery of human existence itself in a way that will leave no serious reader unmoved.
Christopher Marlowe
Though dead before he was thirty, Christopher Marlowe attained a permanent place in English literature. As a lyric and dramatic poet, he was the author, among much else, of the enduring poems that begin "Come live with me and be my love" and "Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" And those lines (from Doctor Faustus) of Helen of Troy that commence, "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/And burned the topless towers of Ilium?"
Marlowe was the first great playwright of the Elizabethan stage. In him we see the transition from medieval drama to the great poetry, tragedy, comedy, and history, the unmatched exploration and evocation of human experience that made the Elizabethan stage one of the greatest ages of literature. In a series of dramas composed in quick succession in the 1580s (Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine the Great, The
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