Book Report: Matrix (31)

27. Lauren Groff, Matrix (2021) (12/6/22)

My sister-in-law and I were talking about historical fiction—something I rarely read—and she mentioned this book by a writer I've certainly heard of but have never read. I bit.

The story begins in 1158 in England. The heroine, Marie, is seventeen. She is perhaps the half-sister of Henry II, born in France of a rape. The book begins as Marie is banished from the court at Westminster by Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, and sent to become prioress (and eventually abbess) at a remote and very poor abbey—for no real reason except that, being homely and "a giantess" (not to mention a bastard), she is unmarriageable, but she does have skills that can be put to use in running the abbey. Marie loves the queen with a passion and feels betrayed, of course. But she makes the most of it, and over a long career she builds the abbey to become a center of feminine power. She also has visions of the Virgin Mary, which help her in her work. The story ends with Marie's death in 1213 at age seventy-two. 

In between, there are of course challenges, which tend to be resolved with seeming ease. A magnificent labyrinth (actually a maze) is built between the nearest town and the abbey, to keep unwanted people away. A reservoir is built. The nuns become adept at every construction job except stonemasonry and expand the buildings of the abbey. They raise sheep and cattle, grow their own fruits and food crops. 

Marie is apparently based on an actual person, the poet Marie de France. One passage in the book describes her writing a series of Breton lais and dedicating them to the king (ostensibly to tweak Eleanor), and in fact Marie de France is best known for just such a series of twelve narrative poems, written in Anglo-Norman. Very little else is known about the historic woman, which gives Groff a lot of license to imagine.

It took me several weeks to read this book, though it isn't long. The language is gorgeous and lush—perhaps to a fault. When it comes down to it, I was left with more of an impression, or mood, than with crisp pictures of life at a medieval abbey. Honestly, it's hard for me to say that I really liked the book. But I was certainly impressed by it. It deserved its nomination for a National Book Award.

The matrix of the title seems to refer to two things: Eve and Mary, on the one hand, and a seal for securing written communications, on the other. 

In one of her visions, Marie witnesses Eve and Mary kiss each other:

Thus they showed me that the war so often vaunted between them was a falsity created by the serpent to sow division and strife and unhappiness in the world.
     For, I saw, it was from Eve's taste of the forbidden fruit that knowledge came, and with knowledge the ability to understand the perfection of the fruit of Mary's womb and the gift given to the world.
     And without the flaw of Eve there could be no purity of Mary.
     And without the womb of Eve, which is the House of Death, there could be no womb of Mary, which is the House of Life.
     Without the first matrix, there could be no salvatrix, the greatest matrix of all.

The second matrix is described in this passage, which occurs after a visit by Eleanor, who leaves Marie two gifts: an abbatial staff of "solid copper, finely engraved with the entirety of the Garden of Eden," and another item,

small, wrapped in a scrap of blue silk. When Marie opens it, she finds a personal seal matrix of herself, a giant with a head in halo, a book in one hand and a broom flower in the other, nuns gathered around standing the height of her waist.
     Scribe mihi, the queen has embroidered on the silk. An order, not a suggestion. To seal a letter with the abbey's matrix requires either the prioress of subprioress to read and agree; what the queen is giving Marie with her own personal seal is a delicious and forbidden privacy.
     For an abbey is collective; privacy is against the Rule, aloneness a luxury, time to think with all the necessary work and meditation and prayer too short to ever come to much. Even reading among the nuns is reading aloud; there is no private dialogue to challenge the internal voice and press it forward. Marie does not wonder why so few of her nuns have the capacity to think for themselves; she saw from the first moment she arrived that this was planted deep in the design of the monastic life. As abbess, she sees how dangerous a free-thinking nun could be. If there were another Marie in her flock, it would be a disaster. She feels a sharpness of guilt from time to time; yet she keeps her nuns in their holy darkness with their work and their prayer. She justifies it be telling herself this is how she keeps her daughters in innocence. Hers is a second Eden.

And now, I'm ready to return to the twenty-first century. I will no doubt give Groff another try, but with a more contemporary story. She's a very good writer. I'll be interested to see how her style changes when she's writing about the present day.