A stroll toward havoc in 12th century

Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger shared the 1992 Booker Prize with Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Unsworth’s 1980 novel Pascali’s Island—which was short-listed for the Booker—was made into a film starring Ben Kingsley and Helen Mirren. His latest, The Ruby in Her Navel, is subtitled A Novel of Love and Intrigue Set in the 12th Century, and—lest you be misled by the provocative title—the operative word is novel.

In other words, if you come to this book expecting to gallop off into a romantic tale of derring-do, you are likely to be disappointed. The emphasis here is less on action than on character and motivation, and the tempo overall is mostly andante moderato, not allegro vivace. The measured pace is essential, though, since this is a tale about how one can walk very deliberately—though altogether unintentionally—toward misery and mayhem.

The setting is Sicily under the Norman King Roger II. Roger received an unusually cosmopolitan and multilingual education, and governed his diverse realm—largely inhabited by Muslim Arabs and Orthodox Greeks—accordingly. The kingdom’s finances, for instance, were left in the hands of Arab functionaries. As Thurstan Beauchamp, our narrator, explains: The Diwan al-tahqiq al-ma’ mur, referred to commonly as either the Diwan of Control or the Diwan of Secrets, was “the central financial office of the palace administration.” The Lord of the Diwan is Yusuf Ibn Mansur, and Thurstan—born “in northern England of a Saxon mother and a landless Norman knight”—is Yusuf’s subordinate and, Thurstan thinks, his protege.

Thurstan’s official title is Purveyor of Pleasures and Shows: He books entertainers for the court. And it is in this capacity that a Greek merchant from Messina informs him of an unusual troupe of musicians and dancers. The women’s bellies, the merchant tells Thurstan, are “one moment smooth, the next moment rolling, while the rest of the body remains still, the face composed, a very amazing thing.”

Thurstan is unimpressed by the merchant’s account, but then, on a mission to procure some small white herons for the royal hunt—and, more important, deliver a crucial diplomatic message to a Serbian rebel—he hears that the dancers the merchant told of are nearby. So he goes to see them, and is enthralled, especially by the young woman named Nesrin—“I had watched only her ... the body savage in its pride, that suffering look about the mouth, dissolving in joy when she smiled.”

Which brings us to the opening of our tale and the title of our book: “When Nesrin the dancer became famous in the courts of Europe,” Thurstan begins, “many were the stories told about the ruby that glowed in her navel as she danced. ... I am the only one who knows the whole story.”

We learn how she got the ruby on the last page. In between is a chronicle of treachery, betrayal and profound self-delusion.

Thurstan was trained from childhood to be a knight and showed great promise. But his dreams of glory were quashed when his father, for reasons Thurstan has never learned, renounced his martial profession and joined a monastery, bringing what wealth and property he had acquired with him.

Thurstan thinks that Yusuf was taken with him because the young Norman spoke Arabic, learned from his Arab nurse. But it is hard not to suspect that it was really because Thurstan is beautiful—tall and muscular, with long blond hair, vain of his person and dress.

Thurstan also has a lovely voice and knows all the latest songs of the Troubadours and does some composing himself. These days, he would be on his way to a successful career as a Sensitive Singer-Songwriter. Thurstan, in short, is an innocent, who really believes in the ideal of chivalry, and that the king is genuinely good and just.

When, on his trip to procure the birds, he encounters Lady Alicia, whom he knew as a child—the two would sneak off together and he would steal a kiss from her now and again—it takes little to persuade him that she, widowed now, heir to her husband’s estates and free, she says, to do as she likes, will choose him for her husband, enabling him at last to satisfy his dreams of knightly valor.

Unfortunately, innocence such as Thurstan’s is dangerous, not so much to the innocent one himself as to those who place their trust in him. It is this that accounts for the sense of foreboding that haunts the narrative.

Nesrin tries to explain to Thurstan what the problem is: “You do not understand. ... You make a shape and it is not true and you keep to that shape and do not see it is the wrong one. ... Do you not see? If we do not break the bad shape, it will break us.”

It is unclear if Thurstan does see, even though, by the time Nesrin tells him this, he knows full well what havoc has been wreaked through his persistent naivete.