The World Above The Sky

Stetson's The World Above the Sky: Over the bounding mainReviewed by Porter AndersonCOPENHAGEN, Denmark - One of the longest sea voyages of all time, surely, is the fabled, re-fabled and again-fabled big float that some people say was made by Henry Sinclair, Scotland's Earl of Orkney, in the late 1300s. The truth about Sinclair has been at sea -- as have historians and legend-lovers on this whole subject -- since 1780, according to Sigurd Towrie, whose level-headed Orkneyjar.com is a fine place to start if you'd like to survey the history and the near-hysteria that bob along in Sinclair's mythic wake. Kent Stetson's The World Above the Sky, getting its launch in April 2010, is probably the most eloquent entry yet in the curiously robust canon of material inspired by the idea that Henry Sinclair somehow made landfall in the Canadian Maritimes almost a century ahead of Columbus' ride into history. One welcome, hard fact is that The World Above the Sky is Stetson's debut as a novelist. The Montreal resident is a Governor General's Literary Award-winning playwright, and is at work on several projects this year, one of them an original musical, Caledonia, with New Brunswick composer Alasdair MacLean. And nothing is more dramatic in Stetson's new prose than the sense of wonderment that informs this author's "insight into what it means to be Canadian," a citation in his 2008 investiture as a member of the Order of Canada. This modern voice of Canadian culture is awash in the magical mystery tour of the Henry Sinclair cult. The tide rises so high that the Holy Grail is under full sail. Yes, there may be more work for Tom Hanks ahead, and how did Dan Brown miss this one? The real Henry Sinclair is known to have lived from about 1345 to 1401. Rosslyn Castle in Scotland was his family seat. The notion that he got himself across the North Atlantic to Newfoundland in the 1390s is tagged to a Venetian document said to have been published in 1558 - anonymously, of course, as all the best such oddities are always published. Let's not concern ourselves with the Zeno Narrative's assertion that somebody named Zichmni, not Sinclair, landed in Greenland, not Canada. And indeed, let's not get tangled here in the gorgeous filigree of the Kirkwall Teaching Scroll, a Rosslyn artifact held by some to mean that Henry Sinclair was associated with the Grail-guarding Knights Templar. Before the scholars yell "hoax!" at us, we'll just get off the subject, mindful that Shakespeare may not have written the only unmentionable Scottish play.The point of Stetson's novel is not to clamber aboard his readers' imaginations to deliver the persuasive punch of "evidence." His Sinclair voyage is no crusade of conversion. Instead, The World Above the Sky is a rhapsody. A reverie. It's a First Nations dream, an elaborate one, a busy toss-and-turn you might have on a Lennox Island summer's night after hearing someone propose that Henry Sinclair: a) did land in Canada and live among the generosity, spiritual beauty and charm of the Mi'kmaq,b) with sea captain Antonio Zeno of that Venetian narrative in tow, c) for the purposes of transporting a divine woman, the carrier of a holy child from d) Europe, which had turned hostile to the Knights Templar.Stetson, a Prince Edward Islander who's no slouch in the dreaming department, may in fact remind some here of a latter-day J.R.R. Tolkien. In good Hobbit-ual tradition, The World Above the Sky charts an arduous journey through Nature-gone-unnatural. These places and their people are named with fanciful and arcane charm: the Canoe of the Two Hunters, the Cave of the Seven Seekers, the Island of the Twelve Standing Oaks.A union called the Two Made One is the goal in this iliad, a co-mingling of "the Royal and Holy Blood of my ancestors," says the Templars' ward Eugainia, "which I freely mix with the Ancient and Honourable Blood of The People. This is the love of the Two Made One." A Birchbark Grail becomes the mystical vessel of Old European and New World wisdom. By book's end, the Great Spirit is sparing nothing in blessing the consummation amid complex dimensions of life-after-life.Native-ways aficionados will find Stetson's meticulous descriptions of implements, ceremonies, customs and concepts both engaging and thoroughgoing. At times, Stetson functions as an anthropologist-poet, lavishing the leisure of a densely detailed survey on such traditions as sweat lodges, big-game hunts and communion with the land and its creatures. Fantasy-genre fans will find otherworldly pleasures here, from walkings-through-rock to meditations on out-of-body tours. Action-adventure types will be reminded that bravery sometimes attracts violence, even in this idyllic setting. And romance readers can't fail to feel the currents of allure that eventually form a love triangle at the farthest reaches of this trek.And as for its literary character, the tone of The World Above the Sky is delivered in epic, elevated language, as when Henry Sinclair tells the godly Eugainia and her Mi'kmaq prince: "The great wheel turned until it came full circle. I dreamed a dream of wind and fire. My Lord. My Lady. I dreamed I saw the blessed face of God: it is the face of man and man, of woman and woman, of woman and man, of you and he together."This, then, is a "legendarium," to appropriate a term Tolkien enjoyed lifting from ecclesiastical circles. Stetson has gathered the ruminations and riffs of centuries into a coastal realm of his own and his people's collective, creative longing. Historian William Thomson wrote of Henry Sinclair's "singular fate to enjoy an ever-expanding posthumous reputation which has very little to do with anything he achieved in his lifetime." Stetson has taken that "singular fate" one major voyage past Orkney in order to ennoble his own homeland as a destination of pride and promise. The reddened sands and foaming seas of his constructs churn into a phosphorescent cosmos of grace. Sail as far as you like and with whatever tales of the Templars you choose - you should be so lucky as to drop anchor in The World Above the Sky.# # #Porter Anderson is a consultant in international media. A producer who has held P-5 diplomatic status in Rome with the United Nations' World Food Programme, he staged the most recent, globally streamed awards ceremony from Denmark of INDEX: Design to Improve Life. A former CNN news anchor, editor and senior producer, he is a National Critics Institute Fellow in the United States, a past critic and columnist with The Village Voice in New York and the Dallas Herald Tribune. Porter Anderson Media is based in Copenhagen and Tampa, Florida.