Prophecy is the second of a trilogy of historical fiction novels that take place in Elizabeth I’s England, where the so-called “art of diplomacy” is but a thin veneer for a war of intelligence over which empire—French, English, Spanish– will reign in Europe and beyond.
The year is 1583, and the Italian philosopher/mathematician/astrologer/poet and former Dominican monk Giordano Bruno has fled the Catholic Inquisition in his homeland and settled in the “relatively more enlightened” city of London, where he lives in the home of the French ambassador and maintains a cover of association with the Catholic French king while secretly working as an asset of Queen Elizabeth’s private secretary and spymaster Francis Walsingham. The political stakes are high, because Elizabeth’s imprisoned cousin Mary is the figurehead and rallying-point of Catholic forces both at home and abroad determined to topple Elizabeth and the Anglican Church, and install her cousin on the throne of England.
In Prophecy, Bruno is working feverishly on a treatise which is guaranteed to shake the religious and political foundations of his world—he goes beyond the heliocentric theories of Copernicus, and posits that there are many stars in an infinite universe which could be hosts to inhabited worlds like ours, just as the Sun is host to Earth and to mankind. His arguments challenge many key tenets of Catholic (and Protestant) doctrine of the time. He is also an admirer of scientist and scholar John Dee, Elizabeth’s personal astrologer who exploits the Queen’s tolerance for his genius to explore the nether regions of mysticism and magic. Bruno is in search of a book once in Dee’s possession, which he hopes will unlock many secrets of the universe, and it is while he is pursuing sightings of the book that he is deployed by Walsingham to spy on the French ambassador’s network of Spanish and English aristocrats working for the cause of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Meanwhile, predictions of Elizabeth’s imminent assassination are spreading and several of her closest handmaidens are being found murdered, with astrological symbols carved into their bodies, and Bruno is the only one perfectly positioned to understand all the mysterious strands as one vast conspiracy against the British throne. But the closer he gets to identifying the conspirators, the closer the conspirators get to Bruno, and he narrowly escapes death repeatedly. Bruno is a delightful character, both vulnerable and tough, brilliant and easily fooled, with a golden tongue that gets him both into and out of multiple scrapes.
Parris’ novel is well-researched and written with the confidence of an historian and the panache of a mystery writer – a satisfying combination indeed.
