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What is history, a faithful accounting of events or a carefully crafted narrative, edited and reshaped by the powerful to manipulate and undermine the powerless? John the Angelic, Volume I of A.P. Andes’ quartet, The Latecoming West, explores one of history’s most egregious omissions, excised from the record with cold precision: the brilliant, willful woman, Pope Joan.
A fearless yet soulful spirit, Joan is no stranger to the savagery of the Middle Ages. Born in Mainz, by sixteen she has survived a vicious Viking raid, her father’s murder, and the loss of their home; educated but homeless, she now faces the perilous existence of a minor unprotected by a man in the brutal world of the ninth century. Craving refuge and a way to nurture her extraordinary curiosity, she adopts the dress and mannerisms of a young man to enter the monastic life, and in the process meets a count who will become her mentor, lover, and closest companion. Though she possesses one of the keenest intellects of her age, Joan faces a spiritual crisis she cannot resolve through any book: How can she challenge the strictures of her church while remaining true to the essence of her faith?
In 855, over forty years after the death of Charlemagne, Pope Joan, having successfully disguised herself as a man, awaits a papal procession. Though she does not know it yet, this day will be her last. Joan will be violently stricken from the holy lineage she has, for a brief time, become a part of, but not before sharing the tale of her ascendance to the papal throne.
The story of Johannes Angelicus, as Joan becomes known, is, like all histories, complicated by the motives of those who survived to share it. As Joan’s erasure draws near, the quartet’s larger narrative summons other cultural deviants spanning from ancient Greece to the Holocaust and beyond. Electrically inventive, this genre-bending novel brings unsung heroes and silenced demons out of the catacombs of collective memory and onto the pages of a new, restored record.
