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Lawrence NorfolkLawrence Norfolk
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Biography
Lawrence Norfolk was born in London in 1963. He read English at King's College, London, graduating in 1986. He began teaching, studied for a Ph.D., and worked as a freelance writer on a number of reference books, contributing articles and reviews to magazines and journals including the Times Literary Supplement.
He is the author of three novels. The first, Lemprière's Dictionary (1991), narrates the events surrounding the publication of John Lemprière's classical dictionary on the eve of the French revolution and encompasses the founding of the East India Company and the massacre at the siege of La Rochelle. The Pope's Rhinoceros (1996) is set in the early sixteenth century and tells the extraordinary story of an attempt by the Portuguese to gain the favour of Pope Leo X by making him a present of an Indian Rhinoceros. His most recent novel is In the Shape of a Boar (2000), encompassing the Greek myth of the hunt for the Calydonian boar and a Second World War narrative.
Lawrence Norfolk lives in London.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Fiction
Bibliography
Lemprière's Dictionary Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991
The Pope's Rhinoceros Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996
New Writing 8 (co-editor with Tibor Fischer) Vintage (in association with The British Council), 1999
In the Shape of a Boar Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000
Prizes and awards
1992 Somerset Maugham Award Lemprière's Dictionary
Critical Perspective
Lawrence Norfolk's novels may initially appear 'difficult', even daunting. They do indeed make formidable demands on readers: massive in length, dense with historical detailing and complexly plotted, linguistically playful as well as displaying a conspicuous classical erudition. He is the very opposite of the 'sentimental' novelist, and those seeking easily accessible fiction had best look elsewhere. But his novels can be approached by realising that Norfolk is essentially a storyteller, whose narratives are full of constant incidents, from atrocity to farce, and fascinating characters, variously, evil or wretched, almost always rich in corruption and decadence. Once the curtain goes up on his somewhat theatrical narratives, a reader is liable to be dragged along compulsively, marvelling at the spectacle, whether for 530 pages Lemprière's Dictionary (1991) or even the 750 of The Pope's Rhinoceros (1996). There are viciously fought battles, excruciating sea voyages, and fabulous creatures; detailed descriptions of torture, rape, rotting food or bodies. Bawdy, at times scatological humour is placed alongside the intricacies of theological argument. Magical 'sprite' figures interact with suffering humanity; the conflicts between armies of rats in sewers mirror those between imperial powers or Italian states vying for supremacy. Each book can take a week to read - and to recover from their relentless assaults upon the senses as well as intellect - but completing them has something of the sense of achievement, even exhilaration, associated with marathons.
Born in London, Norfolk nevertheless shows much more of a European sensibility than his contemporaries in British fiction; as a 'fabulist' he could be compared to, say, Umberto Eco. He is continually inventive, spinning tales out of the darkest (and in some cases, the obscurest) pages of European history; or rather, he describes an 'alternative history' that puts previously unrelated events together as a pattern extending over centuries. Thus, in Lemprière's Dictionary, the East India Company is secretly controlled by French Huguenots, and their massacre in the town of La Rochelle sets in train the events leading to the French Revolution. The rivalry between Spain and Portugal for Papal favours during the early sixteenth-century takes the whimsical form of expeditions to Africa to bring back a rhinoceros for the Pope's menagerie. His latest novel, In the Shape of a Boar (2000) even more audaciously develops its paralleling of myth by history over a time-scale of some 3000 years. The hunt for the Boar of Kalydon in Homeric Greece is re-enacted by the desperate search by Greek partisans for a renegade Nazi intelligence officer during the last days of the Second World War. His novels are, in differing ways, 'quest' narratives, propelled by revenge for atrocities; they can be fabulously involved, linguistically daring, and full of subplots leading to climactic revelations of secrets.
All this is true of the unusually ambitious first novel with which Norfolk came to prominence, Lemprière's Dictionary. The dictionary of its title is designed to be, in late eighteenth-century London, a definitive assembly of classical learning. Its central character John Lemprière has bizarre visions, and experiences increasingly violent acts relating to the compiling of the dictionary: for example, in a parallel of the fate of Actaeon, his father is torn apart by dogs after watching beautiful women bathing. John Fielding, magistrate brother of the novelist Henry, becomes a detective, and these acts are gradually revealed as being orchestrated by the Huguenot 'Cabbala' at work in a network of caves under London. The book's scope is vast, involving long-term revenge on the French Royal family for the La Rochelle massacre, as well as financial conspiracies and maritime fraud. Its characters include soldiers, pirates, scholars, whores, rogues and vagabonds, and even robots.
The Pope's Rhinoceros is probably Norfolk's most highly regarded book; a beast of a narrative, at once magnificent and monstrous, ranging over several centuries and continents. It concerns Europe itself, from origins in the frozen north to corruption in the sensual south, the tribulations of an obscure order of monks to warfare among the early sixteenth century Italian states. All the while there are political and ecclesiastical machinations. As readers we are enabled to see below teeming surfaces to the warring armies of rats in the Papal sewers, and above to the goings-on in its officials' bedrooms; the slaughter of innocents and the inexorable workings of revenge. It opens with the kind of lengthy and involved description at which Norfolk excels: no less than the geological formation of northern Europe, the evolution of its sea creatures, then the native gods and myths of its first human inhabitants. The narrative moves to the thirteenth century for the folk-myth of the rich city of Vineta that sank into the sea during a storm and siege. The church built on this site, Usedom, collapses more than two centuries later and its monks journey to Papal Rome, whose Pope is a Medici of fabulous wealth and political cynicism. His part in the bloody massacre at the city of Prato is gradually revealed, leading to a spectacular set-piece mock sea-battle at the end, when the Pope's rhinoceros makes a belated appearance. Linking all the subplots together is the journal kept by the monks' leader Father Jorg, depicting Roman life in all its bustling sordidness, and their eventual return home.
As in his previous books, though less massively in length, In the Shape of a Boar proceeds, at least in its 'modern' sections, by discrete episodes of crosscutting action. Part I of an epic story of conflict, love and betrayal opens in ancient Greece, and in Homeric style. There is a recitation - accompanied by thirty-four pages of footnotes, dense with classical references - of the names and genealogy of the numerous heroes (and single heroine Atalanta) assembled to track the devastating boar of Kalydon to its lair and kill it. The boar's modern form is as a ruthless and renegade Nazi intelligence officer, whose pursuit and eventual fate forms the essential action. Many ancient/modern parallels are set up, as in the boar's killing of the sons of Thestius, followed by Keristakis's sons being hanged as an act of retribution against the partisans. The modern sections also concern the representative figure of Sol Memel, a Romanian Jew whose wartime experiences, and post-war authorship of an epic poem that draws upon these events, leads to an aftermath in 1970s Paris, when uncomfortable wartime secrets are revealed. He loses track of his wartime lover Ruth, only to meet up with her in a television studio during the making of a documentary. The book's conclusion, and in a wider sense the lesson to be learned from Norfolk's brilliantly constructed but often hellish vision of history, is that 'we are the author of our own monsters'.
Dr Jules Smith, 2002
Further reading on this site
Walberberg Seminar
The Walberberg Seminar is the British Council's largest and longest running annual literature seminar overseas. The most recent Walberberg Seminar was held in January 2009 at Akademie Schmockwitz, Berlin on... more... (15/12/2004)
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