‘For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain’
By Victoria Mackenzie
Bloomsbury Publishing, 176 pages

In biography, facts should be sacred and fiction ought to be profanity. Yet biographers, as we all know, have their lapses, such as when they force the evidence or contrive a story that is not strictly bound by facts. Biographies, perforce, have to be ruled by the texts of the lives they relate, but to tell the story the biographer has to enter as an intervening voice.

Such is the dilemma thrust upon us with the epigraphs from Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe that begin Victoria Mackenzie’s profound novel: 

“Botte for I am a woman, schulde I therefore leve

that I schulde nought telle yowe the goodness of God?”

— Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

“Jesus, what shall I think about?”

— Margery Kempe, “The Book of Margery Kempe”

The epigraphs are texts in dialogue with one another in a novel derived from those texts, which are the outcome of two 15th century women who now can talk to one another, with Margery, a mother of 14, traveling through a corrupt world to take counsel from an anchoress who has not left her cell for 23 years.

Julian has renounced the material world that has saturated Margery. The beginning of Marjorie’s journey to Julian immediately shows why her world, this world, cannot suffice. She can only get through it by wondering, as many people do now, “What would Jesus say?”

The world is such a confusing place that Margery admits: “I fear my neighbours are right, that it is the devil inside me, making me think that I see Christ.” What troubles her, especially as a woman, is that her world does not credit her convictions. And so she seeks out a woman who can see the truth that the world degrades by absenting herself from it. 

What biographers long to do — to seamlessly reveal their subjects’ lives, as if not to intervene but merely to convey another person’s sensibility and reality — is accomplished in passages that seem utterly, transparently palpable:

“Master Aleyn, my friend the Carmelite monk, said to me, ‘Margery, you must go to Norwich to see the anchoress and hear her counsel.’ But now I am here I wish I was back in Lynn. The streets are crowded and both men and women use foul curses. I saw a man put a live mouse between his lips as if it were the sacred host, cheered on by a group of sailors. I tutted as I passed them and one of the men called out to me as if I were a strumpet.”

The world as it is repels Margery because it profanes her own quest to know herself by knowing God, aligning her small pain with Jesus’s great pain. The communion she sees in the streets is of such a debased nature that her own revulsion is regarded as a profanity. 

Ms. Mackenzie’s novel implicitly puts the question: By what higher standard are we to measure a fallen world? It is a question that these two women would not let alone and that is still troubling. It is a question that bedeviled a great moral philosopher, Derek Parfit, who dreaded the idea that morality could be a relative concept — not one that could be established as a universal secular standard.

How do we know in a biography — ours or anyone else’s — the truth? This novel powerfully demonstrates why novels set against texts like “Revelations of Divine Love” and “The Book of Margery Kempe” are of paramount importance. Biographies cannot stand alone any more than novels can, or the lives on which biographies and novels are built.

Truth — in divine and secular terms — is a fraught journey, Ms. Mackenzie’s novel suggests, a thought-pattern that has to be worked out dialectically. Margery can’t do it alone; she needs counsel, just we take counsel of biographies and novels alike, attempting to understand the texts of other lives and ours, even though those lives are no more complete than the texts that are meant to explain them.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Confessions of a Serial Biographer.”