Journey of Souls by Rebecca Warner; Complex and Compelling Composite of Medieval Historical Fiction and Dark Fantasy
Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: Rebecca Warner’s Journey of Souls is a composite of Medieval History and Fantasy that works-for the most part.
It captures a widening schism between religions, politics, class, race, spouses, and parents and children. Within these divisions in the political, religious, and social spheres, there comes division in the supernatural sphere. This is where corrupt people use magic to meet their needs and in reaction, that magic itself becomes corrupt. Both the summoner and the spirits that are summoned fall into envy, rage, revenge, and insanity.
After her son and daughter die, the Countess of Mirefoix (only known as the Lady) in the Pyrenees Mountains decides to use a spell that restores a person’s soul and mind into another's body. She uses some unfortunate “volunteers” (young people that are recruited to serve or kidnapped and taken to Mirefoix) for their body needs. While she thinks at first that she is unsuccessful, spirits do actually enter the bodies of the donors.
One of them is Christine, a modern woman from the 21st century who ends up inside the body of the Lady's niece. While Christine adjusts to Medieval life, she becomes involved in a triangle with Garsenda, the Lady’s daughter, and Bon, a loyal soldier with a secret connection to the Mirefoix Family. Meanwhile, the Lady is becoming unhinged, paranoid , and more obsessed with practicing magic to achieve her ends.
Journey of Souls draws fantasy and reality in equal measures creating a novel that works for Readers who like Dark Fantasies and for those who like more realistic Historical Fiction. The book is awash in historic detail. The Count of Mirefoix is coming home from the Third Crusades to a wife who doesn't love him and vice versa. He is a verbally, physically, and sexually abusive monster who cares more about the estate that he inherited by marriage (Mirefoix is actually the Lady’s by blood) than he does about his wife.
The Count does little to care for the people that reside on the lands the way the Lady and her daughters do. He cares about his family lineage. After his legitimate son, Jehan, dies he decides to name his possible illegitimate son, Bon, to inherit rather than his daughters who have already been named as heiresses after Jehan. He is so intertwined with the idea of primogeniture, that his heir must be a son, that he ignores that he has two able bodied, intelligent, strong willed daughters that can inherit the land. He also ignores that Bon is romantically involved with Garsenda, then Christine and is so loyal that he would give up his claim in a heartbeat if they asked him to.
One of the most realistic moments is when the Lady grieves for her lost children. She holds out vague hope when a messenger reports that “Jehan” survived, but that hope is dashed when she sees a blacksmith with the same name and realizes that her son has died. When she and the Count fight, he collapses and succumbs to his pain. While she doesn’t miss her unloving husband, it is a reminder of how much the Lady can lose in such a brief time.
As she is reeling from those losses, the Lady nurses her sickly daughter, Alienor with the fervent determination of one who has already lost one child and a husband. When she too dies, she realizes that she is left alone with Garsenda, a daughter who doesn’t get along with her mother and believes that she murdered her father, the parent that she preferred. It is a lot to take and the Lady’s anguish is understandable. It also reminds us of how life in the Medieval era was very short and often ended in violent unpleasant death either from illness or in battle.
Religion is intrinsic in the Medieval way of life and the Readers are beginning to experience what happens when religions and religious sects collide and challenge each other. The Count returns from the Crusades, bragging about how he and the soldiers fought against the Muslims whom they saw as “barbaric i!%$#ls.” Then he brags that they took jewels, ancient books, and other valuables of the people that they conquered (making one wonder who the real barbarians actually were). He uses the magic that Muslim caliphs practice to transfer his soul into a young body. Then after he dies, the Lady is willing to use it herself on her own children. For a seemingly religious Catholic family, they don’t mind co opting others’ abilities for their own benefit, even if they claim to be morally against it. Religious hypocrisy: not just a modern thing!
There are also divisions within the Christian religion itself. This comes about because of the war between the Catholics and the Cathars. Catharism was a sect with Gnostic philosophies such as the existence of two deities: God of Heaven and God of the Earth, a personal relationship with the Spirit, and that one can achieve spiritual and knowledge enlightenment, or become a “Cathar Perfect,” through mystical means, most notably reincarnation. This schism would later be echoed in European history in the struggle between the Catholic and Protestant churches.
In Journey of Souls, the Cathars are at first seen as a religious sect that is outside the fringes of society and is gaining popularity. They are at first seen as weird, bizarre, and potentially a threat to the Catholic status quo. The outlook changes when the Lady, after a series of misfortunes including death, insanity, and despair converts to Catharism in a final attempt to save her soul. The fact that one of the main characters, inarguably the central character, becomes a Cathar shows how vast this religion has spread and becomes centralized. It foreshadows the eventual destruction of Catharism by the Catholic Church, and the subsequent trials against heresy such as the Inquisition and the Witch Trials. With powerful people converting to religions that challenged the Catholic authority, the church leaders recognized a threat to their leadership.
There are plenty of other details about Medieval life that spill into the book. One of the most intriguing is that the Count and the Lady are never addressed by their first names. Even the narrative never refers to them by name, just by title. This suggests the remoteness of nobility that even their closest friends and family refer to them by title rather than name.
Another interesting detail is how many misconceptions about the Medieval era are challenged. As if in anticipation of Readers’ complaining about “wokeness,” Warner wrote a detailed essay with citations and references in the last few pages of the book that challenges those ideas suggesting that European history was more diverse and multifaceted than many believed. Among them are the presence of people who aren’t White and Christian in Medieval France. There are dark skinned characters who emigrated from African and Middle Eastern countries. Some retained their Muslim beliefs and previous customs while others assimilated into the European culture around them. Bon himself is half-Chinese and was trained by a mentor who taught him about Buddhism, Eastern philosophies, and fighting techniques.
The power of women in the novel counters the common belief that women were usually thought of as subservient to their husbands. As mentioned earlier, the Lady holds more authority over Mirefoix rather than the Count and is able to make political and military decisions over her people. Her daughter, Garsenda also has a strong sense of leadership in particular when she is forced into hiding, taking the lead within her small group to ensure their survival. Christine quickly adjusts to her new 12-13th century life and commandeers various situations by coming up with various plans and making some tough decisions. In fact, the presence of women in authority is so prevalent that the Count is made to look like a fool for insisting on primogeniture rather than it being seen as the standard of the day.
Besides History, the other aspect of the book that captivates is the Fantasy. As the Lady becomes involved in casting spells, she encounters the jinni, Arabian spirits of great power and mischievous nature but can be subservient to the humans who control them. They are also known as genies. The jinn originally serve her needs but they also display some dangerous undertones. The Lady falls into madness and avarice (particularly when she learns that the jinni and the souls bleed rubies). It is possible that the creatures are driving her insane but it is just as possible that her madness was already within herself and she is bringing out the darker aspects of these beings rather than the other way around.
The spell calls forth various souls like Blodeweth, a priestess whose entrapment in another woman's body makes her bloodthirsty and vengeance seeking and Corvinus, a conniving slave turned nobleman who finds himself inhabiting the body of a raven and is forced to serve as the Lady’s spy. The more that they work for the Lady, the more unhinged that they become until their rage and paranoia results in them turning on each other.
Then there’s Christine. It’s kind of strange for a spirit from the future to inhabit a body in the past. But a few things allow that concept to squeak by in this context. Among them is that it plays into the Catharist view of reincarnation. A spirit who lived in a future time and place alludes to the belief that the soul lives on throughout time in the past and the future.
The other meaning behind Christine’s presence in the past could also play into a Medieval concept of disorder being passed from one sphere to another. From the moment that the Lady casts the soul transference spell, what was seen as a world of human dissension throws the supernatural into the struggles. It is similar to a concept that actually was believed in the Medieval Era and was often echoed in later literary works such as Shakespeare and Marlowe’s plays. Trouble in the natural physical world, in politics, society, status, spills into the supernatural world. For example the murder of Hamlet’s father leads to the presence of the ghost and the uncertainty of Hamlet’s sanity. So the disorder among the realms could also factor into the disorder of time and space that even those spheres are affected by the Lady’s actions. Christine’s presence could be another symptom of the disruption rather than a random occurrence caused by a spell being used in the wrong way and accidentally punching a hole into the future.
While it is easy to say that the presence of the supernatural, the jinn, the resurrected souls, Christine’s time travel, are caused by dark demonic forces, the truth is there was a dark undercurrent before the Lady cast her first spell. Before the Count even picked up the spells and found a caliph who would assist him. It is there in the first few pages in a Count who bragged about destroying a whole culture while playing lip service to his own religion. It is there when a Lady whose hatred for her husband, grief at her children’s death, and desire to hold on and control everything she has overpower her reason, love for her remaining family, her role as a Countess, and her own health and sanity. It is there in a feudal system that has fallen to corruption, self-righteousness, and bigotry with the desire to destroy or deride anything that does not fit the status quo.
This is the imbalance that causes the subsequent disintegration between the natural and supernatural world, human and jinni, living and dead, past and future, fantasy and reality.
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