A Burnable Bookby Bruce HolsingerWilliam Morrow, 2014There's a quick encounter at the beginning of Bruce Holsinger's excellent debut novel A Burnable Book that will strike a very familiar note to a great many readers of historical fiction. The scene is set in the England of 1385 and features a short, almost telegraphic conversation between a court functionary named Sir Stephen Weldon and the poet John Gower, and it goes like this:

"Gower.""Sir Stephen.""Our fine town should consider itself gilded indeed whenever John Gower deigns to abandon Southwark to tread Westminster's humble lanes.""Even as these avenues acclaim your own passings through with their every voice." How I hate this man.Weldon assessed me, a peculiar glint in his eyes. "You look awful, Gower. I'd thought it was your wife who was sick."I stared at his scar. "Sarah died last year. The week of Michaelmas."He raised a hand to his mouth. "I'd not heard."I said nothing."You must forgive me, John," he insisted. "It is inexcusable.""Though unsurprising, Sir. Stephen."His eyes narrowed. He was about to say something more, then thought better of it. They usually do, even the higher knights.

Your own ear will have picked it up already: change around the names just a bit, and that could be dialogue from either of Hilary Mantel's two best-selling Thomas Cromwell novels, Wolf Hall or Bring Up the Bodies, both of which feature a dark horse, dangerous version of Henry VIII's lawyer as he verbally fences with prettified noblemen who expect deference from Cromwell and instead repeatedly encounter a vaguely menacing egalitarianism - and a barely-concealed contempt. How many times in those novels do we get Cromwell's internal monologue telling us how much he hates the person he's talking with at that moment? How many times do even the "higher knights," sensing danger, refrain from the scorn or mockery they'd otherwise have lavished unthinkingly on a mere commoner, a jumped-up litigator from Taunton?The success of those novels probably makes the Cromwellification of historical fiction partly inevitable, and Holsinger embraces it whole-heartedly in the pages of A Burnable Book. Like Mantel's Cromwell, his John Gower is a shadowy figure, a man of hard precepts and unplumbed depths, a Sam Spade in ermine:

Yet I shall never forget the thrill I felt when that first coin of another man's vice fell into my lap, and I realized what I had - and how to use it. Since then I have become a trader in information, a seller of suspicion, a purveyor of foibles and the hidden things of private life. I work alone and always have, without the trappings of craft or creed.John Gower. A guild of one.

The violence to verisimilitude is in both cases the price readers pay for the sheer, pantherine speed and strength of the prose, both in Mantel and in Holsinger (and, we can only hope, in their coming imitators). It's far less dramatically promising if the Cromwell of fiction is the same sniveling, cringing legal lapdog as the Cromwell of fact, and the dramatic disconnect is even more violent when it comes to John Gower, the well-born and "gentle" poet who was close friends with Chaucer and who spent all his time composing long, abstruse verse works that were as technically superior to those of his friend as the verse of Robert Southey was to that of his friend Coleridge - and who wouldn't have known how to purvey the foibles of other men if he'd watched a step-by-step YouTube tutorial on the subject.The plot of Holsinger's novel revolves around a mysterious book whose stanzas predict the deaths of England's first dozen kings - up to and including the one who currently sits on the throne, Richard II; it features a malevolent cabal that will resort to murder in order to possess this book and an almost-equally malevolent cabal determined to thwart their plans. It's a juicy, gripping plot structure, and it would have sent the real-life John Gower mincing and howling for the distant hills. Holsinger's Gower is a very different creature; he's tasked by his friend Chaucer (a mover and shaker in Court circles who feels certain he needs Gower's guild-of-one underworld talents) with finding this mysterious book. There results a fast-paced novel of plot-turns and considerable violence in which all the era's most notable characters - including John of Gaunt and his famous mistress Katherine Swynford - get generous stage-time, and in which there's a great deal of evocative writing ("There was a plug of mint in his lip, his breath strangely pleasant, though his hands smelled of metal," "The ears of Westminster are as plentiful as scales on a herring," and hundreds of other neat throwaway lines). And, very pleasingly, there's also some rumination on the creative differences between Gower and his far more famous poet-friend:

The more I thought about these stories, though, the more I came to see what, in Chaucer's bent imagination, they might have in common. Both dealt with the consequences of sin and fallen flesh. Though the prioress's story more directly concerned death, martyrdom, and persecution, this miller's tale cast its own shadows: another Noah's Flood, the degradation of the marital sacrament, hints of sodomy. As art, then, the stories seemed congruent, eerily so. Once again Chaucer had proven himself a superior teller of tales.

There's even a wafting of rancor - anachronistic, of course, since we have very little concrete evidence that Chaucer's work enjoyed the same proportion of popularity over Gower's in the 14th century as it does in the 21st - when Gower continues thinking about Chaucer's art. Yes, the man is a superior teller of tales - or maybe:

Or a compelling liar ... We had spoken often over the years about the proximity of poetry and deception. To write a great poem, Chaucer insisted, you have to be a great liar. You must convince your readers that your characters are flesh and blood rather than words on dead skin, that their loves and hatreds and passions are as deep and present as the readers' own. Your task is to delight, to pleasure, to life your reader to another sphere of being and then strand him there, floating above the earth and panting for more lines.

There's some winking at the entire creative process here, and it's well-advised; Holsinger most certainly convinces his readers that his characters are flesh and blood, and he keeps his narrative vaulting forward in a way that will hook those readers, especially the ones who find the wait for Hilary Mantel's next book a bit onerous. And if Cromwellification leads to books as good as this one, well, we should all steel ourselves for even daintier hypotheticals than the idea of John Gower as a shadow-operative. We should be ready for "Name's Gerald - Gerald of Wales."