Reviews

In her ten-page Author’s Note and Acknowledgements, Cadwallader shows a well-considered approach and rigorous method in researching and writing this book: ‘As is the practice of historical fiction writers, I have researched deeply then imagined characters and events into the gaps.’ She sets out the fact from the fabled, noting, ‘This is what fires the creative imagination of historical fiction – the gaps, the elisions, the veiling.’

…..

The narrative is interspersed with short poetic sections titled ‘The walls speak’. Here, the stone walls of Lincoln recount the lingering presence of history over the sweep of time, revealing what they have witnessed. This personification – a literal case of ‘if these walls could talk’ – is ambitious, but Cadwallader (who has also published a book of poetry) succeeds by keeping them brief and relevant. Rather than functioning like stand-alone poems, these sections amplify a chapter’s emotional resonance and provide commentary on the events, as a Greek chorus might. They invite the reader to pause, reflect, and perceive human events from a grander view. 

Eleanor and Asher’s romance is passionately sensuous but also reflects their shared love of language, words, and books – and the understanding that stories have power. In time, Eleanor learns to see Asher more fully:

Even as she knows his body so well, he is so much more than her own need and desire: more than a friend and lover, or the father of her daughter, or Abraham and Bona’s son, or the spicer, or a Jew, but as a person, magnificent in his difference from her.

This seeing is important to a book that engages deeply with the concept of ‘the other’. The walls announce that ‘The other is always more / more than you can contain or know’ and decry how people ‘kill the one you cannot understand / other   woman   Jew’. The novel’s epigraph references French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, notable for his work on alterity and an ethics that refuses to objectify or reduce ‘the other’.

Nonetheless, Eleanor can be frustrating in her demands to have her own pain prioritised by her Jewish associates in their moments of greatest need, such as after beatings and arrests. When the king’s edict expelling all Jews from England is announced in 1290 (an expulsion that historically lasted for more than 350 years), Eleanor ‘almost envies the Jews making their plans, thinking of where they will go, who they will travel with, what they will do’, as if they had a choice in leaving. Then again, Eleanor is believable even when she is unlikeable, and, as with all of Cadwallader’s characters, is made real through her flaws. With the third-person point of view limited to Eleanor’s thoughts and feelings, the characters of Marchota (a sardonic elderly Jewish woman) and Hannah (Eleanor’s young daughter) offer a particularly refreshing counterpoint to the protagonist.

The plot drivers in this novel are the unfolding truth about Hugh’s martyrdom and the fate of Eleanor’s and Asher’s love, and though the compelling first half moves into a somewhat repetitive third quarter, the reader remains invested in the rich world Cadwallader has created through to its conclusion.

The novel’s strength lies, above all, in its exquisite use of setting, bringing thirteenth-century Lincoln to life in every detail. Cadwallader’s skill in evoking a sense of place is first-rate. It’s the kind of immersion that makes you pause in wonder – remembering Lucy Treloar’s nineteenth-century Coorong or David Whish-Wilson’s gold-rush-era San Francisco – and think, ‘Ah, so that’s how it’s done.’ 

Naama GreySmith, Australian Book Review, July 2023, No. 455

From the author of The Anchoress (2015) comes another richly drawn medieval historical novel. In The Fire and the Rose, we follow Eleanor, an independent-minded young woman who has learned, unusually for the time, to read and write. Eleanor is compelled to leave her village. A prominent birthmark makes marriage a distant prospect, but it isn’t her ambition anyway. Determined to use her sharp mind and her abilities, Eleanor travels to Lincoln, where she meets a Jewish spice merchant, Asher, who shares her passion for the written word. A romance develops, but prejudice looms large on the road ahead. In 1276, England is a dangerous place for Jews. The antisemitic blood libel against them (Jews were accused of murdering children and drinking their blood) is infull swing, and increasing persecution will lead, within a generation, to their expulsion by royal decree. Robyn Cadwallader clearly knows her stuff. Her meticulously researched novel will stimulate and beguile those with a taste for medieval history; it’s also an instructive look at a racism that prefigures the modern variety.

Cameron Woodhead, Sydney Morning Herald, June 2, 2023

This superbly written and faultlessly crafted novel is a big read, an articulate and moving demonstration of the way we repeat our sad histories. But it is as much a story of hope in the capacity of the exceptional human individual to endure and overcome the greatest of obstacles to freedom of thought.

Barbie Robinson, The Riot Act

This is a historical literary feast – exquisite poetic writing that will challenge your imagination and move you to deep thought. It will also, at times, tighten your throat and make you clench your fists as you walk through the battles of the innocent from 1276-1290. It is a magnificent work of art in its approach and delivery. I truly do not know where to begin to praise The Fire and the Rose as it is in a league of its own.

read more here—Cindy L Spear

The Fire and the Rose, however, is not a history book but one in which Cadwallader has ‘researched deeply then imagined characters and events into the gaps’, and her imagination has brought Lincoln and its inhabitants vividly and excitingly to life. Anyone who read The Anchoress will know how Cadwallader can grip her readers and immerse them in the lives of her characters so deeply that you live with them, feel for them, and worry about them. She does this again in The Fire and the Rose…..It is hard to convey, in a short review, the richness and the emotional depth of this story, and the power of the history it covers.

read more here

Ann Skea, Newtown Review of Books

HistFic that explores injustice in the past can shine a light on pernicious effects that persist to this day.  Robyn Cadwallader’s latest novel The Fire and the Rose isn’t just a novel of star-crossed lovers frustrated by religious differences, and it isn’t just an independent woman confronting barriers to her ambitions.  Even if you know something of the long history of anti-Semitism, this novel is a confronting exposé of its prevalence in England in the medieval period, from the role of the church in perpetuating an untrue historical record to the king’s expulsion of all Jews in 1290.

read more here

Lisa Hill, ANZ Litlovers Blog