2024-10-17 12:59:00
Lesbian love, bad loans and conflicts between natives and globalists: bestselling author Frank Schätzing makes the current Middle Ages seem as if they were today. The good thing: Schätzing only tells stories and doesn’t bother you with messages.
Family constellation: French King Louis and his wife Margaret, English King Henry III. and his wife Eleanor (sister of the French queen), as well as the rebellious Earl of Leicester, Simon de Montfort, and his wife Nora, sister of the English king, want to make one last attempt to reconcile Henry and Simon, and so they strike each other. Hurts, insults, unattainable claims and demands all around you. It does not work.
At one point only Eleanor and Nora remain in the apple orchard carrying on in the rain, a 39-year-old and a 47-year-old who once meant a lot to each other and are now drifting apart from each other. Then “Nora comes over and kisses her on the mouth”, like when Eleanor was only 13 years old. «Nora’s hands know too well where to go. Don’t move. I don’t have to. If I move, I’m lost. Then inside this willow tree I will forget who I am, I will forget everything, but here she is already holding Nora in her arms, returning the kiss, returning everything, feeling Nora’s fingers where they shouldn’t be.”
That’s not really what it says, one might think of this point on page 772 of the novel “Heroes” by Frank Schätzing. But it’s there. Just like Schätzing makes his characters swear “Fuck Francis of Assisi with tits!” or a friendly apothecary recommends the work “De coitu” by Constantine Africanus to the English queen, who is visiting her ailing husband after he has been stricken with typhus (“What, a book about climax?” she whispered. “Oh yes!” ). The 13th century unleashing on you doesn’t hold you back, in any way. He explodes, rebels, eats and vomits, body fluids, floods and blood constantly flows. After reading “Heroes” you no longer think that the gap between the present and the year 1263 is considerable.
The story he tells: A group of patricians from Cologne smuggle 50 mercenaries and a bag of gold to England, Henry III. it is to be supported against the rebellion of the barons led by Simon Montfort against him, a sort of investment in commercial privileges and sales markets. Of course everything goes wrong. The ship Colonia is sunk, they are attacked on land relentlessly, their gold is supposedly stolen, and so on, as happens in stories that are said to unfold a historical panorama.
Schätzing paints a picture of hidden objects
However, Schätzing did not paint it with a steady hand, but rather a hidden object picture. His science fiction novel “The Swarm” was one of them. “Heroes”, the sequel to “Death and the Devil” (2006), also revels in the details, describing the assault on a defense tower or the violence of flamethrowers with the same meticulousness as banquet menus or cataloging smells of the worlds that his book is measured, so thoroughly and extensively that you always forget exactly where you are in all these plots, stacked and layered on top of each other: the character list lists over seven dozen names.
What is it even about? But is a novel about something? Of course, in Schätzing’s 1263 you can always see echoes of 2024: the supply chain problems, the juggling of credit cascades that might collapse at some point, the conflicts between globalizers and indigenous peoples who feel threatened from them, the strategies of populism – but you do not get any parables from him and you are not bothered by him with teachings.
It’s more as if he decided to use his means – those of a narrator fascinated by his material – to dive headlong into the story and let himself be carried wherever it goes. It is an immense pleasure to swim with him. Although it is not uncommon to feel like you are sinking, you continue to surface again and again and admire the sparkle of the splashes. Aren’t there already too many novels that are holding you back? Here is the countermodel, a gesture that, once let go, can no longer be contained. Estimate has already announced the sequel to “Heroes”.
Frank Schätzing: Heroes. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1040 pages, 36 euros.
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