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Inspired by real-life characters and events, THE GOOD MEN is an epic first novel of the battle between the flesh and the spirit, love and betrayal, set amid the inquisition carried out by the Catholic Church against heresy in fourteenth-century France. Author Charmaine Craig was studying medieval literature as an undergraduate at Harvard when she first read the testimony of Grazida Lizier, a young woman from a remote mountain village, who was actually tried on heresy charges. Haunted by the document, Craig decided to write a novel based on it when she entered the graduate writing program at the University of California at Irvine. After conducting extensive research in France and the United States, Craig expanded Grazida's tale into a sweeping narrative spanning three generations and six decades of turbulent European history.

At the center of Craig's story are a doubting priest, Pierre Clergue, and the three women he loves above all others: Grazida; her mother, Fabrisse, who is Clergue's illegitimate niece; and Fabrisse's mother, Marquise. As the novel opens in 1265, Clergue is wrestling with the conflict between his vow of celibacy and his burgeoning passion for women - a passion that he resists for some years, but then indulges extravagantly.

The Cathar heresy and the Good Men

Clergue's village, Montaillou, in the Pyrenees mountains of southwestern France, was one of the last centers of the Cathar heresy. Unlike traditional Christianity, which holds that God created both the material and spiritual worlds, the Cathars were rigidly dualistic. They believed that God created everything immaterial and spiritual, while Satan created everything material and base. Convinced that the material world was the source of all sin and corruption, the Cathars - who called themselves the Good Men - refrained from sex, eating meat, taking oaths, and fighting. As their numbers in various parts of France grew into the thousands, posing a challenge to the absolute authority of the Catholic Church in religious matters, they were ruthlessly denounced, interrogated, tortured, slaughtered, and burned at the stake.

"Fascinated by the split between the spirit and the flesh"

Craig writes in an afterword to her novel: "For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the split in Western culture between the spirit and the flesh - a split that echoes the deeper chasm between heaven and earth, and God and man. I have been troubled and intrigued by these dualisms because they do not exist as such in one culture I was brought up in, that of my mother's people, the Karen. The largest ethnic minority group in Burma, the Karen are primarily animist. They are at once profoundly spiritual and in touch with the earth, and view these tendencies as indistinguishable." Moreover, Craig has a long history of heresy in her family. On her father's side, there are Massachusetts Puritans and French Huguenots who fled religious persecution. On her mother's side, she had a Jewish grandfather who became a Christian and a grandmother who suffered racial and religious discrimination in Burma.

Craig knew as an undergraduate that she wanted to probe questions of God and faith and the possibility of transcendence, yet had no idea that these issues would resonate most richly for her in the literature of medieval France. In the courtly novels of the Middle Ages, quests for honor and spiritual salvation were often thwarted by earthly passions; themes of righteousness and duty intersected with themes of sensuality and illicit desire. In the writings of the female medieval mystics, however, Craig found that the flesh was seen not in opposition to the spirit, but as an instrument through which the spirit could flourish, and merge ecstatically with the divine. Later, when Craig came across Grazida Lizier's deposition, she was struck by this uneducated, twenty-year-old woman's ardently mystical worldview, in which her moral and spiritual sensibilities were shaped by her physical experiences.

An enthralling and intellectually ambitious novel that embraces a fascinating, little-known historical episode as well as compelling spiritual and emotional concerns, THE GOOD MEN marks a bold and distinctive literary debut by a remarkably assured and skilled young writer.

About the Book:
THE GOOD MEN
By Charmaine Craig
Riverhead Books
ISBN: 157322197X
402 pages

Subsidiary Rights Information:
Foreign Rights:
Denmark - Lindhardt and Ringhof
Finland - Otava
France - Presses de la Cite
Holland - Contact
Italy - Bompiani

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