Emily Maguire has written across fiction and nonfiction, for adults and young people, stepping easily from one to the other across a career punctuated by award wins and shortlistings (including her 2016 novel, An Isolated Incident, shortlisted for the Stella prize, the Miles Franklin and book of the year at the Australian Book Industry awards).
In Rapture, her seventh novel, she turns her hand to historical fiction. Drawing inspiration from the life of Pope Joan, the woman who (according to legend) disguised herself as a man and served as pope for two years during the middle ages, Maguire examines questions of faith using the language of the body.
Like her literary peer Charlotte Wood, whose convent novel Stone Yard Devotional has been shortlisted for the 2024 Booker prize, Maguire is writing into an emerging spiritual zeitgeist. It’s impossible to avoid comparison between these two books and authors, although they’re very different. Where Wood meditates on humanity and an individual’s sense of purpose through her deep and uneasy reflection on place, Maguire, in a way that is characteristic of her work, gets straight to the heart of her protagonist.
Agnes is a motherless child who has nonetheless found heaven in the small wonders she observes in ninth-century Mainz (located in what is now Germany). Her father, an English priest, raises her to be curious, devout and clever – unseemly traits for women of the time. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that as an adolescent, desperate to devote her life to study rather than servitude, Agnes sheds her female identity to become John the Englishman. As a man, Agnes gains access to the teachings of God and the church, rising through the ranks from lowly Benedictine monk to celebrated scholar, beloved by Pope Leo himself.
Maguire reminds the reader of Agnes’ duality throughout the novel, interjecting with the occasional couplet – “she is forty years old and the Bishop of Rome; she is an unmarriageable sixteen-year-old girl from Mainz with dreams of sainthood”. Agnes is a lesson in contradictions, her own body betraying her more often than not as it bleeds, desires, falls pregnant. But it is also her womanhood that provokes her most interesting insights and questions. “Why allow me, Lord,” she wonders, “sin-soaked and false, to enjoy such glory and grace every day?”
Through Agnes, Maguire questions why a life in the service of God should so vehemently be seen to oppose a life appreciating the pleasure of His creation.
Rapture is steeped in history but it wears those trappings lightly; it’s an easy read with plenty of intrigue and high stakes, given the catastrophic consequences for Agnes if she is found out. A reader with minimal knowledge of Christianity or the middle ages could miss many of the allusions to fact, perhaps even the references to Pope Joan – even in her author’s note, Maguire is non-specific – but it doesn’t matter; a lack of context will take nothing from the novel’s complexity or the reader’s overall enjoyment. Agnes struggles with contemporary questions that require few imaginative leaps from the reader – faith, meaning, love and feminism.
Maguire doesn’t necessarily offer any new specifics to the legend. Those who have seen or read other narratives inspired by Pope Joan will recognise her suffering, the way she struggles with her human limitations but remains committed to God. But the tale is made fresh by the intimacy of its telling; the way that Maguire brings a reader, even a jaded atheist like myself, close to questions of faith. She asks (and answers) the questions of the novel through Agnes’ body, allowing the reader to feel it in kind. When Agnes prays in the presence of the holiest of relics, she feels “nothing, save for the pain in her knees”. When her body desires, she starves it. The scarlet of her cardinal’s cape is, she reflects, “the red of wet lips, flushed cheeks. Of pinched nipples and swollen labia.”
Agnes feels her connection to God in every part of her body, even as she despairs at it. Her body bears the marks of her faith but also her desire, her pain, her flaws. She is wholly, deeply, human.
Rapture is also a book that exalts in the joys of curiosity, and of understanding the world through the act of writing and reading. Like Pip Williams’ beloved Dictionary of Lost Words, there is a layer of Maguire’s novel for readers who delight in the sensual creation of books, from the parchment to the words written on it. When Agnes strives to find the words that will reanimate Pope Leo in the eyes of his constituents, she finds a relevant religious text in his library and “reads and rereads, taking copious notes until she has it memorised. She repeats the most powerful lines instead of her prayers until their structure and rhythm pulses through her like blood”.
In these moments, Agnes might be the same eager reader as any of us, brought to life by a story’s energy. She is not only Pope Joan but also a child, a scholar, a woman, a lover, a teacher. And through her, Maguire manages to tease apart, if only for a moment, the purity of faith itself from the ambitions of the institutions that control it.
Rapture by Emily Maguire is published by Allen and Unwin ($32.99)
