Strange Saint

Strange Saint

By Andrew Beahrs (363 pages)

Published by The Toby Press

Bookish rating: 4

Strange Saint is a strange book. Unlike anything I’ve read before, and beautifully and lovingly crafted, it also took me 4 or 5 months to finish it.

Set in the early 1600s, we follow Melode, who is a servant for some Separatist Congregationalists (later known as the pilgrims), who defy the Church of England and thus must skedaddle to the New World. Melode falls in love (or at the very least, lust), gets into some trouble on the ship voyage, and faces a host of challenges in the New World.

Beahrs pulls on a rather unique background—anthropology and archaeology, along with that all-important MFA—to, in his words, find the “illiterate (and hence voiceless) people who are too often absent from existing records” (p. 370). He succeeds with Melode.

Beahrs is one of those writers who pays super close attention to each word, the cadence of each sentence, and the image of each phrase. Such care of the craft of writing is refreshing, thus I believe this novel should be more widely read than it has been. The style, dialogue, and narration aim to reflect the time period, which is of course rather difficult because nobody really knows exactly how these folks actually talked. The practical problem, though, is that, artful as it may be, the style makes for terribly slow reading.

For example, “Daniel Williams and Jonathan Hooker plot ill. Beechwood’s cabin is often empty, they whisper. It is the only space on board that is so. It is true at the stern, close by to where a pole leads from a tiller to the feck pilot. I long for sleep; a small dying of wind has opened the deck to many Saints, leaving their hold as free from their sickening swelter as it will ever be. But the murmuring rubs me, and I say in aged voice that I should not press for entrance to a captain’s cabin. These are fools, these boys who nothing of a closeroom” (p. 161).

The language is lovely, but the reader must simply slow down to absorb—and follow—it. The text also gets slowed by a complete lack of quotation marks for dialogue. Although no doubt a deliberate stylistic choice to immerse the reader more fully in Melode’s milieu, lack of quotation marks is just confusing. You must re-read to determine (a) if it’s dialogue or not, and (b) if it is dialogue, who is speaking. At worst, this stunt reeks of MFA-workshop, affected style. At best, it adds a certain tone and even cadence to the text. My view is that the confusion and necessary re-reading outweigh whatever stylistic benefit Beahrs achieves. And if he’s aiming to reflect the time period, well, the novel itself wasn’t even invented for another 120 years or so post-Melode, so it’s not like a little extra punctuation would’ve destroyed historical accuracy.

That said, Melode is a memorable, powerful character. The writing is lovingly, carefully crafted—without being overwritten. Reading Melode’s story, you can’t help but feel like you’ve gotten a glimpse into a real yet unwritten story. After finishing Strange Saint, I couldn’t but wonder how many other “voiceless” stories have been—and will forever be—silenced by graves and time.