Metafictional medieval

I've been thinking about Bruce Holsinger's two medieval historical mysteries, A Burnable Book and The Invention of Fire, both featuring that absolutely obvious detective figure, the poet John Gower (aka That Other Fourteenth-Century Poet, Not Chaucer).  Ironically enough, this type of historical novel, which effectively functions as a mode of popular (albeit alternate) history, qualifies as neo-Victorian--it's a more ambitious and/or elevated version of the novels written by Elizabeth Rundle Charles, A. D. Crake, E. L. Cutts, Emily Sarah Holt et al.  In any event, to get things out of the way, while Holsinger shows promise as a novelist, there are some problems of craft that need further attention: the plots rely heavily on Gower being a blithering idiot; there's rather too much Jean Auel-ish infodumping, although the second novel shows signs of improvement on that score; and some dreaded detective novel cliches rear their heads (e.g., the villain explaining his motives just long enough for someone to kill him).  Moreover, after the events of the first novel, it's not at all clear why Gower is still talking to Chaucer, as opposed to breaking the fingers on his writing hand at every opportunity.  

Still, there's an interesting tension between Gower's, er, incompetence and the novels' deeply convoluted narrative forms (more convoluted in the first novel than in the second).  Both novels are about assassination plots of one sort or another--apparently linear plots that aim simultaneously for closure (regicide) and an opening up of the unknown (a new king on the throne, a foreign takeover, etc.).   The narratives themselves, however, rely on multiple points-of-view, ranging from Gower's first-person sections to a number of third-person focalizers; moreover, in A Burnable Book, one of the narratives, set off in italics, cannot be immediately assigned to a speaker.  While Gower may be our primary viewpoint character, he exists in a text that owes more to Chaucer's (in-progress) Canterbury Tales, with its polyphonic structure unified by the pilgrimage frame.  (In fact, The Invention of Fire partly involves a bunch of characters on pilgrimage, one of them an especially hardnosed take on the Wife of Bath.)  Despite his "job" as detective (or whatever we want to call him), Gower has a real penchant for seeing only what he wants to see; he perceives other people poorly, both literally and figuratively.  Although Gower associates himself in A Burnable Book with St. Thomas, "[t]he patron saint of doubt and suspicion, of verifiable information, in whatever form it comes" (422), his fixation on accumulating and exchanging disconnected, embarrassing objects of knowledge--in other words, he's a blackmailer--doesn't stand him in particularly good stead when it comes to constructing incriminating narratives.  Despite his affinity for St. Thomas, Gower is a terrible judge of people, repeatedly failing to poke his finger into relevant wounds; he is repeatedly misled by his son, by Chaucer, and by various other major and minor characters, all of whom find him relatively easy to hoodwink.  In The Invention of Fire, Gower reflects ruefully on his failure to identify the right plot, "hobbled over a stick, walking blindly along a trail of polished stones, his weakening eyes discerning only what had been arranged for them to see" (401).  It's telling that the spectacles he purchases only work for reading, as opposed to perceiving distances.  Tasked with identifying plots, Gower defers to other people's frames, subsiding into mental passivity whenever, like a jackdaw, he spots something especially shiny.  He is not, that is, particularly interested in telling a good story.  

Which is the problem.  At the end of the novel, Gower pastiches Chaucer writing up the story of Margery and Robert, the murderess who stands in for the Wife of Bath and the man with whom she falls in love, and then offers his own, much less happy version.  "A poet should not be some sweet-singing bird in a trap, feasting on the meat while blind to the net," complains Gower, "[t]he net is the meat, all those entanglements and snares and iron claws that hobble us and prevent our escape from the limits of our weak and fallen flesh" (450).   This assessment pits Chaucer the clear narrative craftsman against Gower's perception of a fragmentary, incoherent and perhaps mutually destructive world, in which poetic optimism fails to take into account human nature, red in tooth and claw.  The novel provides no ending at all for Margery and Robert, only Gower's two versions.  But Gower is in a genre that demands solutions, carefully-delineated motivations, clues, "fair play."  It's more Chaucer's genre than Gower's, in other words.