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Omnia sunt communia. Q by Luther Blisset - a review.

Nearly five hundred years before the Russian serfs were emancipated, Wat Tyler demanded that “no man should be a serf, nor do homage or any manner of service to any lord” and that no one should serve any man but at his own will. Later on, but still before the Reformation, the Czech Taborites sought to abolish power and all institutions, including Church and State. Revolutionary thinking in Europe was not unique to the Enlightenment and the centuries since.

A spy thriller and a bawdy, action-packed picaresque, Q is the story of what we would now call an activist, if not an anarchist, told against the background of Reformation Europe. Anyone who has been involved in social or political protest will warm to the urgency of the descriptions of the activists’ preparations and attempts to mobilise the public. There is talk of printing presses and distribution of flyers and also cool, pragmatic debate about tactics, while people grumble that “the cops never change.” Indeed, anyone who has stood on a rainy street, flyer in hand, trying to interest the public in their cause will probably be envious of the successes of the narrator and his companions.

Similarly, Ursula’s “spectacles” in Strasbourg (part 2, chapter 14) will be familiar with readers of Indymedia (anti-war protests in Ireland have featured people dressed in the orange overalls of Camp X-Ray prisoners being menaced by others dressed as soldiers). Also in Strasbourg the activists build a brick wall in front of the pulpit in the church: what might now be called a “direct action.” In part 2, chapter 15 the narrator complains that the powers that be (Capito and Bucer) are drawing distinctions between “peaceful” and “seditious” Baptists. The debate about the establishment’s division of protestors into “good” and “bad” is very much alive today. For a historical novel, Q is ferociously modern, but only if you are under the illusion that radicalism is a recent phenomenon.

The narrator’s guiding light is Thomas Müntzer, a leader in the Peasants’ War who preached “a sort of anarchical individualism” (Grant). A perhaps more conservative historian, G. R. Elton, describes him as a “demonic genius” and “in his preaching of violence a dangerous lunatic.” But the Müntzer of Q is an unmistakeably sympathetic character with his faith in ordinary people’s ability to think for themselves and draw their own conclusions from the Bible without the mediation of the Church. “We were free and equal in the name of God,” the narrator exults while travelling Germany spreading the news. For all the talk of Luther and the Pope, Q is more about personal freedom than religious freedom. The narrator grows disillusioned with Luther, who abandoned the peasants to their disproportionately bloody fate in the Peasants’ War, and as he grows older (the novel spans 30 years) begins to use Lutherans (“useful, albeit undesirable, allies”) in power plays against the establishment. It is a feature of this activist that he is prepared to use all kinds of tactics to achieve his goals and is not hampered by scruples about participating in the power system he is seeking to bring down.

When peasant leader Wat Tyler met King Richard in 1381 he took him by the hand, called him his brother and “rinsed his mouth in a very rude and disgusting fashion before the king.” The rudeness is significant, symbolising a levelling of relations, and is a feature of Q as well. After the more sedate environs of, say, John Banville’s Kepler, the language of this novel is bracing, to say the least and by no means a projection of our vulgar present into the past: Elton writes that the real Müntzer’s attacks on Luther were foulmouthed but that Luther in turn was well able for it: “his own writing was often earthy and coarse”. Q makes some attempts at archaic vocabulary (“the smell of the humours”) but they remain half-hearted by comparison with the blasts of obscenities. Frederick the Elector’s good old fashioned “Silence!” is outgunned by his own “And quite right too: you’ve fucked up mightily”.

There is a healthy strain of carnival in the book (Rabelais, author of Pantagruel and Gargantua, was solidly of the age). The activists seek to turn the social order upside down, drawing their members not just from humble workers, but from the ranks of pimps and bandits too, and sending their biggest, dumbest member to the Diet with the bishop of Münster. Again, this is not necessarily a projection of modern egalitarianism into the distant past. Jan Bockelson of the Münster Anabaptists really was a tailor and Jan Matthys was a baker. And as for vulgarity: a few illustrations from the 1500s at the end of the book should put paid to ideas of more decorous times.

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