A Wider Web of Meaning

Rosemary Sutcliff - The Lantern Bearers

What are the limits of bibliotherapy? What are the limits of therapy itself? How can you meaningfully accompany someone who has suffered the very worst that life can offer? I’m talking about war crimes, physical and sexual abuse, the death of a child, etc. How can a book - a story, poem, myth, whatever - be of any possible use to a person going through such agony?

All I can say is that I wouldn’t be here - on this page and in person - if I didn’t believe in the redemptive power of the Word. It has the ability - like Christ Himself in the Harrowing of Hell - to descend to the darkest places and bring light, healing, refreshment and peace. Despite all the horror, savagery and brutality that the world can throw at us, the possibility of new life is always present. It is a promise - an Easter vow - and a flame that can never be quenched.

Rosemary Sutcliff’s novel The Lantern Bearers (1959) would be a prudent recommendation for such ‘hard cases’, I feel. It is clear and stark in its depictions of just how horrendous life sometimes gets. Yet it never forgets the bigger picture - the wider pattern unfolding around us, even in the midst of tragedy, whether we perceive that pattern or not.

I want to hone in on two related episodes that evoke the grief and loss embedded in the book, but also this more spacious scheme of things that embraces and transcends both suffering and joy. Aquila, Sutcliff’s protagonist, is eighteen years old at the outset and suffers from what we would call today ‘normalcy bias.’ Though aware of changing circumstances and marks of decline across the land, he can’t conceive of a different life than the one he was born into, and so he thinks and feels that it will necessarily go on forever.

This is mid-fifth-century Britain and Aquila is serving with the Roman Auxiliaries, the last remaining imperial troops, based at the coastal fort of Rutupiae in modern day Kent. He has a long and illustrious Romano-British heritage and his family have tended the same farm on the Sussex Downs for three hundred years. He is both Roman and British, therefore, and this feels to Aquila a wholly natural and organic unity, impossible to undercut or sunder. Yet when the decision is taken to withdraw the Auxiliaries from Britain, he suddenly sees just how artificial and constructed this identity has been. He now has to choose between Britain and Rome - to sail away with his fellows or desert the Eagles and return to his father’s farm, to face the growing Saxon threat together with his family.

After three days of inner turmoil, at the last moment possible, Aquila opts to stay behind. It is evening. All has been made ready, and the ship - The Clytemnestra - is poised to disembark. Aquila hides at the top of the great beacon tower of Rutupiae, which has been set alight every night for the past four centuries to guide ships into bay and show that Britain belongs to Rome. But the beacon will never be lit again, and the thought of it is intolerable to Aquila. On an impulse, after the ship has gone, weighed down by sadness and conflicted loyalties, Aquila sets it ablaze once more. But why he does so, he would be hard pressed to say. It is a gesture which comes from ‘somewhere else’, from beyond the rational mind:

He flung water from the tank in the corner on to the blackened bull’s-hide fire shield, and crouched holding it before him by the brazier, feeding the blaze to its greatest strength. The heart of it was glowing now, a blasting, blinding core of heat and brightness under the flames; even from the shores of Gaul they would see the blaze and say, ‘Ah, there is Rutupiae’s Light.’ It was his farewell to so many things; to the whole world that he had been bred to. But it was something more: a defiance against the dark.

Aquila returns to his father’s farm, but it doesn’t take long for things to take an even darker turn when Saxon raiders burst in, kill his father and carry his sister off to their camp. Aquila fights hard but is eventually overcome. The Saxons tie him to a tree and leave him as food for a nearby pack of wolves. But the wolves do not come and Aquila is picked up by a separate band of raiders - Jutes this time - and is taken away with them to Jutland as a slave.

Aquila stays there in a state of numbness and shock for three years, going through the motions of his new life, doing what he has to do to survive, but with no hope or expectations for the future. When, however, the Jutes set off to settle permanently in Britain, Aquila finds himself back home again, not far from his old stamping ground at Rutupiae. In a roundabout manner, involving a fleeting but pivotal reunion with his sister, Aquila manages to escape. He has learned, while he has been away, that his father’s murder was not in fact the result of a chance barbarian raid, but was a political assassination ordered by the British king (and Saxon puppet) Vortigern. He only has one aim in mind now - to find and kill the informer who betrayed his family. But this doesn’t happen. The betrayer, himself a victim of Saxon torturers, is already dead. What Aquila finds instead is love, acceptance, a widening of horizons, and the first buds of healing and redemption. He meets in the forest a monk called Ninnias who, through a blend of inner calm, active listening, and skilful questioning is able to penetrate Aquila’s defences and bring him to a place of receptivity and quiet.

Ninnias tells him that he used to gaze out every evening towards the far-off coastline where, each night at sunset, the Rutupiae Beacon would shine magnificently forth. One night, he says, the light was very late in coming, then the next it never came at all, and Ninnias knew then that the old order had passed. The strange thing, he continues, is that he has found out since that the beacon was lit that last night after the Romans had left. He speculates that some stray deserter might have been behind it, and it is here that Aquila, much against his conscious will, begins to open up as the bristly, defensive persona he has constructed to protect himself begins to dissolve:

‘Why should a deserter take the trouble to light Rutupiae Beacon?’ he demanded, and his voice sounded rough in his own ears.

‘Maybe in farewell, maybe in defiance. Maybe to hold back the dark for one more night.’

‘To hold back the dark for one more night,’ Aquila repeated broodingly, his mind going back to that last night, after the galleys sailed, seeing again the beacon platform in the dead silver moonlight, the sudden red flare of the beacon under his hands. And two days march away this man had been watching for it, and seen it come, In an odd way, that had been their first meeting, his and the quiet brown man’s beside him; as though something of each had reached out to make contact with the other, in the sudden flare of Rutupiae Beacon. ‘That was a shrewd guess,’ he said.

The point in all this is that Aquila has no idea when it happens, confused and bewildered as he is, of how significant his lighting of the beacon is. As the book progresses, we learn that Ninnius was not the only one watching out that night. Others, further off still, beheld the light too, and it became for them a symbol of resistance and hope and the beginning, in many respects, of the Arthurian legend.

When the worst happens in life, we feel lost and abandoned, tossing and turning in a black wind of despair and futility. This is real. This is true. Yet none of us are aware of the full picture. We don’t have a God’s-eye view or full spectrum vision. We struggle to conceive of a broader frame of reference in which the crosses we bear start to take on meaning and significance. We also tend to underestimate the potential impact of our thoughts and actions. But everything we do and think - no matter how impulsive or erratic - has an echo. Ripples are set in motion, and the world is changed, for better or for worse, in usually subtle but sometimes quite dramatic ways.

This is the great take-home message of The Lantern Bearers for me. Our suffering doesn’t play out in a senseless void, regardless of how much it might feel to us like it does. It has a weight. It has a significance. It has a function in the overall economy of things. Aquila, we might say, is fortunate in that by the end of the book he has started to glimpse the outlines of this overarching narrative. He gains a measure of understanding into the how and why behind the events that have shaped his life. The old order is not restored and his losses remain real and tangible. Yet a new life of purpose and direction has built itself up around him. He has become a lieutenant of Ambrosius Aurelianus, the Romano-British prince who his father championed and ultimately died for. There is fighting aplenty ahead and much darkness still to come, but Aquila ends the book looking forward rather than back, and that's no mean achievement given all he has endured.

So many people, however - too many, sadly - pass through decade after decade without even starting to comprehend the rhyme or reason behind it all. Yet I would still recommend them The Lantern Bearers. Why? Simply because it portrays a character whose life has been smashed to pieces but is held throughout in a wider web of meaning. A critic might claim in response that it’s ‘only’ fiction and that real life doesn't work like this. But to my mind the fact that Sutcliff has conceived and described such a scenario shows that it’s not only possible but actually, tangibly true. We see this not just in The Lantern Bearers but throughout her whole oeuvre. She is one of these writers who faces the right way - towards the light, towards the sun - and by doing so makes herself receptive to the truth.

None of this is wishful thinking on Sutcliff’s part either. Other writers, after all, have taken a different path and made themselves vectors of nihilism and despair. Our problem is that we’ve been brought up in a cultural milieu which believes that if something’s horrible then it must be ‘true’, while if something’s beautiful and noble then it must on some level be ‘false.’ Yet the opposite is the case. It’s the other way around. Evil, as St. Augustine observed, has no substantial reality of its own. It is nothing but a parasite, a privation of the good. Dante beholds this in at the end of the Paradiso when he sees that the power behind the whole created order is ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars.’

We may not become aware of this wider web of meaning while we are alive. But we should know that it exists. And that should be enough for us - just the fact that it exists; the fact that it is there - the light that shone for us once, the light that shines still in our hearts, the light that can and will shine again.

You’ll see that light again. You will. I promise you.