Trunk of Scrolls by Darlene Bocek

[Dr Jack]

This is a new old book. In other words, this the 2nd edition of a 2016 release, even more interesting, with more sub-plots.

 

It is set in the 6th century AD, in the Byzantine Empire. This is part of the beauty of historical fiction: what is 9 years between editions?

 

Trunk of Scrolls touches the deepest emotions, from that horrid feeling that even God has deserted you, to seeing all your dreams come true when you could never have done it by your own best efforts.

It's a long book - some 500 pages. But Bocek brilliantly breaks it down into small smidgens of two or three pages, so you get through it effortlessly. And each smidgen has a strong hook that pulls you inexorably into the next one. It's hard to put down and leaves you determined to get back as soon as possible!

Although I have read a lot of history and historical fiction, I had known little about the history of the Byzantine Empire in the 6th century. What you read about in the textbooks on this period of the reign of Emperor Justinian the Great is mainly his attempt to re-establish the Roman Empire by taking Italy and North Africa back from the Germanic and Central Asian barbarians, while still carrying on Rome's 600-year-long war against the Persian Empire in Mesopotamia, Syria and Armenia. You read about Justinian's first attempt to codify Roman law, the Corpus Juris Civilis, the origin of most European law today.

But Bocek's book wastes little time on all that, beyond some passing references. W showmhat you see is that the Anatolia of the "new Rome" was full of robbers, cheats and roaming bands of barbarians, so even a short journey put you on the brink of death or enslavement for life. You see that, in Justinian's first five years, there were two earthquakes in Antioch that levelled and burnt the city, literally "melting" the Patriarch, plus the Nika riots in Constantinople. The devastation that the Nika riots caused is shown graphically, yet in words. The sooty, traumatised, suddenly-orphaned children, wandering the streets covered with rubble, looking desperately for water to survive another day, calls 2024 Gaza to mind.
 

And you learn that Justinian's great General, Belisarius, who vanquished huge armies of bloodthirsty barbarians for "the new Rome" with small armies and brilliant tactics, tried to kill Justinian, caused the inhuman destruction of the Nika riots, tried to enslave an 18-year-old girl on false promises of marriage, extorting her father to the point of emaciation, and, in the end, pinned it all on his best friend and got him executed, when he saw his plan couldn't work and the Emperor was winning. It is a people's history of Justinian's early reign, from the bottom up, not a story of conquests and armies. In the process, this book explores the farthest extremes to which men can go - of evil, deceit, destruction, faith, charity and self-sacrifice.

Trunk of Scrolls is marketed as a Christian book, largely because of the author's role as a pastor's wife and a kind of lay preacher on the internet. But you won't have to sit through any "See the light and repent your wicked ways or burn in the eternal fire!" in this book. It is a higher, more philosophical level of Christianity taken up in this book, addressing questions common to all religions like "Who is God?" "What does He expect of us?" "Why does He let bad things happen to us and seem to undo all the good we try to do?" "Why do bad people acquire such wealth and power?" Anyone, Christian or not, who cares about these central questions of human existence, can learn something from this book, even though the answers are based soundly in Scripture.

To some extent, one could not write a history of the Byzantine Empire without reference to Christianity. When Emperor Constantine not only legalised Christianity, in the early 300s AD, after 25 years of Diocletian's merciless persecutions, but made it the State religion, Christians believed that God's Kingdom had come. But, 200 years later, Christians were seeing the negative aspects of having their religion, in effect, nationalised. 

 

Every issue of faith and dogma became a political question. Those whose consciences led to results different from the official dogma led to risked being labelled "traitors to the Emperor"  d suffering the consequences of that. Justinian, for example, shut down the Academia,  continuing Plato's tradition in Athens, for "teaching paganism". 

 

Trunk of Scrolls shows how the issue of whether Jesus was a man, God Himself, or truly God and truly man deeply divided Byzantine society. The issue had been going on for 200 years, since the Council of Nicaea, but still provoked passionate debate, even dividing families and breaking up relationships. 

 

The chasm through every aspect of society was even worse than the "Brexit" debate  in Britain in 2016-2019. Indeed,  the issue got down into daily life to the extent that "monophysite" (a believer that Jesus was only a man) became something like a curse word, to be thrown at people you didn't like, regardless of their position in the debate, as if "Remainer" had taken on a meaning something like "oik". Thank God things never got so bad in Britain, but the Byzantines never adopted solutions like referenda and general elections, which settled Brexit.

Then, politics were - dare I say it? - Byzantine. Trunk of Scrolls explains that there were four Parties under Justinian: Blue, Red, Green and Black, based not on ideology but on supporting different charioteer teams in the chariot races in the Hippodrome. Supporters dressed in their colours, sang their songs and tried to kill supporters of opposing teams, in the chariot race if possible or even in the stands or outside the Hippodrome. Justinian was a Blue and lavished his Party with gold and State offices: they were the only politicians he trusted. Before he sent his Imperial Guard, under Belisarus and others, to kill all the other Parties in the Hippodrome and stop the Nika riots, Justinian sent money to the Blues there and told them to get out of the Hippodrome. The Nika ("victory") riots began when Greens demanded "mercy" for their Party members arrested by Justinian's Imperial Guard and tried to kill all the supporters of the other Parties. The best science fiction writers could not have designed such a world!

So there is a lot to learn, a strange world to encounter (the more rewarding because it is ours!), an exploration of the deepest emotions and the highest ideals, in Trunk of Scrolls. I commend it to anyone over the age of 18, not because there is anything objectionable in it but because younger readers might not understand many aspects and might be adversely affected by the death, violence and misery depicted in many parts.