A Distant Funhouse Mirror

Christopher Buckley: The Relic Master

National Review, January 25, 2016

By the late Middle Ages, scraps of Mary Magdalene were strewn all over Europe. Not only was her body (or most of it) on display in the town of Saint-Maximin in Provence (it’s still there, if you want to take a look), but, as Charles Freeman notes in his Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe (2011), “there were three more of her bodies” to see, one near Ancona, one in Rome, and one in Constantinople. Lucky Abbéville had a head; Cologne had embraced two of her arms, and “five more were known” elsewhere. Relics were part of the sea of faith, to borrow a phrase, in which most Christians swam, but they were also a handily profitable device to prop up temporal and spiritual power. As such, they were an excellent business opportunity.

Enter Dismas, the Swiss hero of The Relic Master, Christopher Buckley’s beguiling, funny, and slyly erudite new book. Dismas (named, not inappropriately, after the penitent thief crucified alongside Christ), a former mercenary — a Reisläufer — and former monk (“couldn’t get used to the hours”), has become a dealer in relics, one of the best, a man not without a certain degree of integrity. Disdainful of the sloppier and more disgraceful frauds, he deals in nothing he knows to be false. He stands by that leaf he sold from the Burning Bush.

Dismas is in Basel for the 1517 relic fair, a fair that never existed but is located by Buckley in a city that plays host nowadays to an annual fair showcasing contemporary art. The kneecap of Saint Afra then, a spot painting by Damien Hirst now, objects of desire and of worship, objects that magically bestow much-coveted properties on their owners, some sort of holiness in the first case, some sort of sophistication in the second, as well as the status that comes with buying anything — kneecap or spot — that is outrageously expensive enough.

Such relics often fetched tidy sums, not least because of the revenues brought by the pilgrims who came to venerate them, thereby possibly improving their prospects in the afterlife — for a price: “Donate such and such sum,” writes Buckley, “to venerate such and such relic, and so many years would be deducted from your term in Purgatory.” They could be useful, indulgences: get-out-of-purgatory-sooner cards, never short of takers. After Basel, Dismas delivers a haul of relics to one of his two main clients, an archbishop of great splendor and greater cynicism. After careful episcopal evaluation, it is determined that the 296 relics “would provide an aggregate indulgence value of 52,206 years off time in Purgatory. And provide his grace with a tidy return on his investment.” It was madness, but, like many manias, not without its internal logic.

Buckley’s tone is amused and amusing, but choosing to write such a book now, after the Internet bubble, after the 2008 bust (how were collateralized mortgage obligations, uh, valued, anyway?), and at a time when billion-dollar “unicorns” gallop through private-equity portfolios, undercuts any suggestion of condescension. Thus Dismas and many, many others discover that their cash has been looted by a crooked financier, Master Bernhardt. The locals contemplate what might be an appropriately grotesque punishment — burning, death by bear, something even nastier involving fishhooks? In the end, he gets off with a “well-attended” beheading. Absent the beheading, an echo of Madoff there, I thought; Bernie, Bernard, ah.

The year 1517 is an interesting one — a year at the cusp — for Buckley to pick. Within weeks of Dismas’s expedition to the relics fair, he is in Wittenberg, visiting his other key client, the Elector Frederick of Saxony. And Dismas is with Frederick when the elector is told that Martin Luther has been busy at the Castle Church: “‘Ninety-five [theses],’ Frederick smiled, ‘is our church door sufficiently commodious?’”

Dismas is soon wondering what Luther’s less than indulgent treatment of indulgences might mean for his trade: “Many indulgences were earned by venerating relics. If indulgences were abolished, who would come to venerate the holy bones?” He was right to worry: Frederick gave up collecting relics within a year or two. And then there was grim John Calvin. His Treatise on Relics (1543) is a work far rougher on those souvenirs of sanctity than anything you’ll find in Buckley. So much of the Virgin Mary’s milk was on display, jeered Calvin, that “had the Virgin been a wet-nurse her whole life, or a dairy, she could not have produced more than is shown as hers in various parts.” A dairy.

Hints of the shift in thinking beginning to percolate through Europe at this time are scattered through The Relic Master. Dismas is a traditionalist, but he struggles to answer some of the increasingly awkward questions that his friends are beginning to ask. Surely the “indulgence business” was in the Gospels “somewhere.”

I’ll pause now to reassure anyone worried that he or she has stumbled into a discussion of a learned volume on 16th-century religious controversies rather than a review of the latest book by Christopher Buckley, a famously enjoyable writer related, so to speak, to this magazine. Fear not: The Relic Master covers some serious historical ground and boasts an impressive list of sources at the end, including Freeman’s book and an account of a marriage in 16th-century Nuremberg that I, for one, will be hurrying to read — one day. But it also features killings, torture, hand-to-hand fighting, attempted crucifixions, a beautiful girl, bizarre superstitions, three loutish arquebus-slingers, trout nibbling at a severed arm, power politics, a lecherous Medici, herbal Viagra that works, black humor (“Frederick’s not a burner”), good jokes, and some splendidly wry writing: “Tetzel was a supple theologian. He’d pioneered a new form of indulgence whereby you could buy full indulgence for sins you had not yet committed. Even Jesus hadn’t thought of that.” Supple.

It’s never easy to know how to handle the distant past in fiction. Hollywood’s classic couldn’t-care-less generated some terrific lines (“War, war! That’s all you ever think about, Dick Plantagenet! You burner, you pillager!”) but failed to convince, while more respectable attempts at the old ye olde were neither authentic nor readable: Sir Walter Scott, I’m looking at you. Others have mined history to make fun of the present, or to make fun of the past; some — Robert Harris, for example, in his Cicero trilogy — have treated it seriously, both as a window into a vanished civilization and as a device to reexamine more modern times. Others still (such as, in his own way, Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose) have tried to understand a way of thinking that can seem impossibly alien today.

There are glimpses of that lost sensibility in The Relic Master. Buckley’s characters are not Enlightenment folk centuries out of time, or even Bob Hopes cracking wise on the road to Chambéry — but their 16th-century attitudes are presented lightly and never weigh down what is essentially a romp, a caper, written with a wink (“A German pope? Judgment Day will come first”) in breezily contemporary prose (not a “prithee” in sight). Buckley is often described as a satirist, but in this book he comes across more as someone enormously entertained by man’s perennial absurdity, an absurdity he relishes pushing just that bit further, teasing then — and now.

So far as the plot is concerned, the MacGuffin involves the faking of one Jesus burial shroud and then the taking of another (it’s complicated). Dismas’s dream of a prosperous retirement in safe, neutral Switzerland (Harry Lime might sneer, but the Swiss have long been a sensible people) has been trashed by the banker who looted his savings. That compels him to go on one last, atypically dodgy “mission” — that’s where the shroud(s) come in — to earn back that retirement in the mountains. And as we all know, one last missions have a way of turning tricky. Dismas’s farewell tour is no exception. I won’t be a spoiler, but I will say that, once again, fishhooks have an unpleasant role to play, that a ridiculously narcissistic Dürer (yes, that Dürer) is an accomplice, that the girl shoots a mean crossbow, that an imperial posse is thwarted, that disguises are deployed, that a performance of the Last Supper is sabotaged, and that the arquebus-slingers — Unks, Cunrat, and Nutker, three goons with strong Three Stooges characteristics — turn out not to be so bad in the end.

It’s a story that — as capers should — rolls merrily along. It was clearly fun to write, and it is certainly fun to read, but the very best of this book comes in moments such as this, included in the description of Dismas’s arrival in Wittenberg:

“Did you bring wonderful things?”

“One or two. Saint Barbara. A toe.”




Queen of The Desert

Christopher Buckley: Queen of the Desert

National Review, November 8, 2004

All it takes for evil to prevail, warned Burke, is “for enough good men to do nothing.” True; but that doesn’t mean that the good men cannot occasionally relax with a good laugh or two. It might even help them, especially in a situation of the kind the West faces today: a war with an ideology so dedicated to the destruction of happiness that, in the shape of the Taliban, it made laughing too loud in public a crime. (For women, anyway.)

In Florence of Arabia, his dark, disturbing, and very funny new satire, Christopher Buckley highlights the cruelty of radical Islamism and the contradictions of America’s response to it. He does this against a backdrop not of history at its grimmest or journalism at its most intense, but of jokes, mockery, bouts of wordplay (a State Department bureaucrat is a “desk-limpet,” an Arab potentate has lips that are “oyster-moist from a life- time’s contact with the greatest delicacies the world [has] to offer”), and puns that teeter on the edge of catastrophe: The repressive Arab kingdom that is—along, naturally, with France—the main villain of this book goes by the name of Wasabia.

Wasabia is a sand-swept nightmare marked by oil wealth, joylessness, corruption, and ritualized cruelty, a tyranny where “offenses that in other religions would earn you a lecture from the rabbi, five Hail Marys from a priest, and, for Episcopalians, a plastic pink flamingo on your front lawn” are punished by “beheading, amputation, flogging, blinding, and having your tongue cut out . . . A Google search using the key phrases ‘Wasabia’ and ‘La Dolce Vita’ results in no matches.” Well, Prince Bandar, does that remind you of anywhere?

Gallows humor? Certainly. But insofar as the jihadists—with their car bombs, suicide bombs, and dreams of dirty bombs and worse—wish to shove you and me into mass graves at the earliest possible moment, a touch of Tyburn does not seem amiss. Of course, there are people who will find some of what Buckley has to say distinctly, you know, insensitive. The caliphs of multiculturalism will twitch a little, and this is not a book that will find many fans in Foggy Bottom (“the State Department’s reflexive response to any American in extremis overseas is to hand them a pamphlet—along with a list of incompetent local lawyers—and say, ‘We told you so’”).

But satire should not make comfortable reading for the subscribers to any orthodoxy. Running through this book is the clear implication that the American approach to the Middle East has not worked out quite as well as might have been hoped. And what, exactly, is the role played in Buckley’s drama by the Waldorf Group, an investment company (named, hmmm, after a New York hotel) that has danced a little too long, a little too closely, and a little too profitably with the despots of Wasabia?

But about Buckley’s heroine Florence, at least, there are no doubts. Forced out of the State Department for her unwanted imagination and initiative, she now has a new assignment: using covert funds to set up a TV station to transmit to the Arab masses. This will not, of course, be another Al-Jazeera, glossily repackaging nationalist resentments and religious prejudice 24/7, but nor will it be a source of ticky-tacky U.S. propaganda, ineffectively boasting about multicultural contentment in midwestern suburbs. Instead it will be something altogether more revolutionary, directed at the most excluded and mistreated of all the Arab masses: women. This will be Lifetime for women who really have no lives, its purpose to promote female emancipation as a counterbalance to militant Islam.

Qatar, the home of Al-Jazeera, being presumably unavailable, Florence’s TV station is hosted by the venal but fairly relaxed emirate of Matar (“pronounced, for reasons unclear, Mutter”), a state let created by Churchill at one of those colonial conferences that have done so much to make the Middle East the cheery place that it is today. “One might suspect,” writes Buckley, “that its borders had been drawn so as to deprive . . . Wasabia of access to the sea. One would be right.” The result was to leave Matar rich, permanently grateful to old Winston (spotting Matar’s Churchillian place names is one of the book’s many pleasures), and under the control of a royal family that knows how to handle its mullahs: cash, cars, and “an annual six-week paid sabbatical, which most of them chose to take in the South of France, one of Islam’s holiest sites.”

This relatively tolerant country makes an ideal base for Florence and her offbeat and entertaining team: a delightfully cynical PR man, a State Department employee so camp that he could have been pitching tents with T. E. Lawrence, and a CIA Col. Kurtz lite (a seductive— ask Florence—and effective mix of Esquire and Soldier of Fortune).

Throughout, Buckley’s lightly ironic tone only accentuates the savagery that is his main target, making it somehow all the more terrible when, as in this extract, it comes into clear, brutal focus:

The package turned out to contain a videotape. It showed Fatima buried in sand up to her neck, being stoned to death with small rocks. The tape was twenty minutes long. Everyone who watched it wept. Florence brought the tape to Laila. She could not bring herself to view it again so she left the room while Laila viewed it. She waited outside on the terrace, looking out over the Gulf in the moonlight, her skin misted by salty droplets from the fountain that spouted out the royal crest. Laila emerged, pale and shaken. Neither woman spoke. The two of them stood by the balustrade overlooking the gardens, listening to the waves lap the shore and the onshore breeze rustle the fronds of the date palms.

And then, right at the end of this book, cruel, bleak, awful reality finally comes crashing in. There, in the closing acknowledgments, Buckley pays tribute to Fern Holland, “a real-life Florence of Arabia,” who was assassinated in Iraq on March 9, 2004.

She was trying to help, and that would not do.

Contact

Christopher Buckley: Little Green Men

National Review, April 18, 1999

SPACE aliens are a nasty, bug-eyed lot, always plotting to subjugate the galaxy and firing off death rays. Not much use to us humans, you might think. But you would be wrong. As a plot device, the extraterrestrial can he most useful, a light shone on the peculiarities of this planet. And so, in his latest, and very funny, novel, Christopher Buckley employs a motley and distinctly home-grown bunch of ETs to take a look at a close encounter between two different worlds, both of which happen to be located here on Earth. His hero, John Banion, is a king of the first of these worlds, Beltway Washington: a prince of pundits, a griller of presidents, his Sunday-morning show in D.C.must-see. And the Washington Buckley portrays with his customary collection of one-liners and insightful zingers is a venal, absurd place. He reproduces its portentous language with perfect pitch (an intern program—no, not that one— called "Excellence in Futurity") and its pretentious inhabitants with perfect bitch.

The city described here is salon Washington, the home of power politics at its most trivial, inhabited by a Renaissance Weekend of grotesques, including a widowed hostess who married a fortune and became an ambassador in Europe, and a "suave, immense, baritone-voiced" African-American, the president's "first friend." What of the president himself? He's an "ozone-hugger" who speaks in a "slow, overly patient tone of voice that suggested he wasn't sure English was your first language."

Which may be wise, for as John Banion is soon to discover, it's a different world out beyond the elite enclaves. In The Bonfire of the Vanities, Sherman McCoy arrived there by means of a wrong turn after the Triborough Bridge. For Christopher Buckley's soon-to-fall Master of the Universe, there's no wrong turn—in effect, somebody else grabs the wheel. The luckless pundit is abducted by things, subjected to unpleasant procedures, and then abandoned on a golf course, with a pain down below "that reminded him of how he'd felt after the colonoscopy, a feeling of stretching ..."

It gets worse. A second abduction convinces Banion that the alien threat is real. He has to become the "Paul Revere of the Milky Way" and warn the world. The problem is that his world, the Washington world, doesn't want to know. He quickly becomes an embarrassment, an intergalactic Pierre Salinger. With wicked relish, Buckley shows us how Banion loses wife, contacts, and contracts. Cruel man that he is, the author even makes his Job-like hero go through the ordeal of an AA-style "intervention" by friends.

The inhabitants of another world altogether. Planet Ufology, however, prick up their (wish-they-could-be-pointed) ears when they hear Banion's message. The newsman is just what the saucer crowd has been waiting for. He's famous, possibly even sane, a plausible spokesman far closer to the mainstream than most in the UFO world, a world that Buckley bas obviously researched with care. Its celebrities (with changed names: flying writs are more dangerous than flying saucers) are on parade. And so are its stories, speculations, and just plain hoaxes: Roswell, Area 51, Grays, Nordics, cattle mutilations, even that Richard Nixon/Jackie Gleason business (long story, but, as usual in these matters, it involves alien corpses). And Banion? Well, he's no Sherman McCoy. He refuses to remain fallen but instead picks himself up and becomes a master of this new universe.

Yet even as he is lionized by the crowd at a (marvelously described) UFO conference, our protagonist can't help noting that "there was something lacking in these people's lives." The ultimate insider exchanges his Washington post for plebeian life in the USA today but . . . well, as Egalitarian of the Year he simply does not cut it. Nor does the author, who cheerfully resumes the political incorrectness displayed so enjoyably in his last novel. Thank You for Smoking. Potential offendees include Canada, dwarves, the space program, Eleanor Roosevelt, PBS, electric chairs, Cuban detainees, Indiana housewives, and Sammy Davis Jr.'s missing eye.

As we discover, the UFO nation is not a small one. In fact, you are living in it. Its credulous hordes are large enough to overwhelm John Banion's old Washington kingdom, and the rewards it offers, both financially and in terms of sheer adulation, are far greater. Like one of those Roman generals sent off to deal with the barbarians in the latter days of the empire, Banion is able to return to torment the capital at the head of a vast army of co-opted provincials, in his case a three-million strong "Millennium Man" march.

Then what happens? What can be disclosed without spoiling the plot (the author reveals this detail early on) is the book's underlying premise that the whole UFO business, including Banion's abduction, was a fraud from the very beginning, engineered by Majestic, the most secret of all government departments. Its purpose? Initially, to worry Stalin, but later to keep the U.S. taxpayer sufficiently "alarmed about the possibility of invasion from outer space ... to vote yea for big weapons and space programs."

It's possible (think of the health-care "crisis" or global warming), but X-philes who read this book will find the idea a little far fetched, even for a satire. Conspiratorially, they will talk about the documents that purport to show that Majestic really did exist. Patiently, they will explain that the aim of this real Majestic was not to fabricate UFO evidence, but to conceal it. Darkly, they will tell you that, if these documents are genuine, Buckley's tale can only help to mislead a country that has already been misinformed for far too long.

And why would the author do this? For a clue, check out the career of his hero, the television pundit be puts in the firing line. That's also his father's job. Yes, his father, that same "W. F. Buckley" who was mentioned twice in Jim Marrs's Alien Agenda, last year's expose of the UFO cover-up. Could Buckley the Son be part of the conspiracy?

I don't know, but next time you are in the Buckley neighborhood, watch out for those black helicopters.