BEWARE SPOILERS
Keith Roberts was and is a very much under-rated writer. He never really got the recognition he deserved during his lifetime (he died in 2000). He wrote mostly at the intersection of SF and Fantasy with the occasional foray into the historical and suspense genres. Roberts’ forte was in writing books made up of a series of lightly linked vignettes exploring an idea or theme, Pavane was one of these. Some commentators have described this as a mosaic approach. I have not read everything he wrote but I have never come across a complete duffer of a story from Roberts. Some of them like Molly Zero and the Furies are much weaker than most of his output. Even so the Furies is a quite serviceable Wydnamesque story about Britain being overrun by giant wasps and Molly Zero is an interesting rite of passage novel set in a mild dystopia written in a very unusual style.
Some of his materials such as Kiteworld are the subject of intense debates, some regard the book as an incomplete, botched project. Others regard it as a magnificent conception and one of the first Steampunk novels.
His best longer works are Kiteworld, Gráinne, The Chalk Giants and Pavane. The Chalk Giants which is also a book of vignettes contains a number of disconcerting parallels with Pavane. Excellent as Gráinne and The Chalk Giants are Pavane is Roberts’ Masterwork, it is head and shoulders above anything else the man ever wrote. Anthony Burgess considered it one of the best books of the twentieth century; it has many other supporters including myself.
Other posters have already described the background and, for want of a better phrase the foreground plot of Pavane. I won’t go over it again. As has also been mentioned it is written in a very lyrical way. It has some of the most poetic and emotional lines in all of fantasy/SF especially in the last story Corfe Gate in which the Lady Eleanor begins the revolt of the English and Welsh castles against the Papacy. This is the message she sends to her people to tell them she is in rebellion.
‘Tell them [her tenants] ... they pay no tithes to Purbeck* but in arms. Tell them the Gate** is closed and Eleanor holds the key ...’
*Corfe Castle stands on the Isle of Purbeck
** The Castle was known as the gate to the West.
This is my favorite description of a part of the siege of Corfe in which the three great trebuchets assailing its wall are destroyed by sally and gunfire.
‘And that morning they sallied before it was light, fifty strong and burned Direwolf; his bones still lie there on the hill. The long gun Prince of Peace broke the arms of his fellow, arms so long and stout there was no wood to replace them. So they brought in the greatgun Holy Meg and she and the culverin talked to each other across the valley till the smoke rolled back from the hills like steam from a boiling pot.’
Roberts also tells us where the title of the book comes from comes from when Eleanor echoes Shakespeare’s comment on the world being a stage but she goes further implying everything is deterministic:
‘It’s like a dance somehow an minuet or a pavane.’
It is also rooted in the landscape of the English West Country, which is where the comparison with Hardy arises. For example the steam traction engines which play so large a part in the book do not appear by chance, they worked all over the West Country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today the Great Dorset Steam Fair held near Dorchester is the biggest steam and traction engine fair in the world. Durnovaria is an important town in the book it is actually the old Roman name for Dorchester. Corfe Castle is a fallen monster as Roberts describes it at the end of the book. In our world it was demolished after it fell to the Parliamentarians during the Wars of the Three Crowns in 1645. It may well be that when Roberts chose to have the Lady Eleanor command the defence of Corfe he was echoing life, as its last commander was a woman Lady Mary Bankes. The castle fell neither to siege nor storm but to treachery.
Ultimately Pavane is not really an Alternative History at all. The god in the machine is repeated history or perhaps iterated history is a better phrase as history is only repeated until humanity attains a state of reason. Basically in the world of Pavane both the Roman Catholic Church and the People of the Hills (Fairies) have the capability to look into earlier worlds all of which ended in nuclear holocaust. Hence the relevance of the crab symbol which is really the supposition of two pairs of arrows, one pair splitting one pair combining ‘After fission (weapons), fusion (weapons)’ (my use of the word weapons). The Roman Catholic Church’s retardation of technological development is an act of stewardship, to allow humanity to develop reason to a point where the capability to build fission and fusion weapons will not lead to an inevitable holocaust and the end of humanity. If you read it carefully all of this is explained in the letter from Sir John Falconer (Faulkner)`, Fairy and one time Seneschal to the Lady Eleanor to her son John. In fact it is really a letter of explanation to us, the readers of the book it contains the lines:
Did she [the Roman Catholic Church] oppress? Did she hang and burn? A little yes, but there was no Belsen, no Buchenwald, no Passchendaele.
Even at the end of the book however the nature of the Fairies is not clear but it hints the may be able to see the future of the world of Pavane.
