Troubadour

Mary Hoffman’s Costa Book Award shortlisted novel Troubadour has now been published in a handsome new paperback edition. Hoffman is already much admired by readers and critics alike for her historical and fantasy novels but it is easy to see why this book in particular so impressed the award judges.

The novel is set in 13th-century France, against the background of the Albigensian Crusade. This is a period of history that will be little known to young people, but it is one full of drama and horror. Following the murder of a papal legate in 1208, Pope Innocent III launched a crusade against the Cathars of what is now Languedoc. For the next 20 years the Cathars were ruthlessly persecuted and many thousands of people, heretics and Catholics alike, were slaughtered.

Mary Hoffman gives us eye-witness accounts of the main events of the war, including a dramatic opening with the murder of the unfortunate legate. Central to her story are two star-crossed lovers, Bertran de Miramont, a troubadour and Believer, and Elinor de Sévignan, the young daughter of a wealthy lord. Elinor’s father, himself a Believer, senses the likelihood of war and tries to protect his daughter by marrying her to another wealthy lord with a well-protected stronghold. Elinor however is already in love with Bertran and, driven to desperate measures, flees her father’s castle dressed as a minstrel.

As the war breaks out around them both are in terrible danger, Bertran in particular. When he is caught and imprisoned by the Pope’s men, Elinor is able to stage a dramatic rescue. Rather like one of the courtly dances Elinor finds so difficult, the two come together only to have to separate immediately, and from then on their paths keep them far apart. Bertran is to witnesses the atrocities of war at close quarters, including the horrifiying torture of prisoners at Bram, while Elinor suffers personal agony, only hearing of the terrible deaths of her father and brother months after they died.

Mary Hoffman skilfully weaves her research into the narrative bringing the life and times of her characters brilliantly to life. Elinor is a passionate and appealing heroine, and the descriptions of her life as first joglaresa, or female minstrel, and then trobairitz, or female troubadour, fascinating. By the time the she and Bertran meet again at the end of the book, Elinor has been changed by her experiences, and in a poignant final twist the book gives a glimpse of what might have been, had they lived in different times.