Parsifal

by Peter Vansittart

In this glittering, kaleidoscopic new novel Peter Vansittart recreated and projects in his own inimitable style the familiar story from Wagner’s opera in historical perspective.

Genres: Historical Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published July 31, 1989

About the author

Peter Vansittart was a master of the historical novel and a writer of outstanding talent. He wrote more than 40 books, which also encompassed anthologies, works on literature and social history.

Reviews

[Keith Currie · Rating 5 out of 5]

False Redeemer

‘The past is no Roman road, but more often a maze...’ It is only when I begin a novel by Peter Vansittart that I realise what a lazy reader I have become and how lazy most writers are.

Here is presented in an historical/fantastical/mythological kaleidoscope an interpretation of the ‘perfect knight’. There are five chapters, the first only a few lines: the timeless narrator remarks that he has been an intimate acquaintance of Parsifal to Richard Wagner, thus occasioning the composer’s instant suspicion and dislike.

Three long chapters follow: the first set in a magical, but brutal, Germanic dark-age, some time contemporary with the foundation of Rome, perhaps. Through a landscape of magic and superstition rides the nameless knight-fool, Peredur, in his quest first to the Bear-King, then for an elusive unspecified ‘grail’. Next, many centuries later, the narrator encounters Percival for the first time, in a richly imagined Duchy of Burgundy. Like a wall hanging representing a mythological scene, but in the dress of its own time, so both knight and duchy appear anachronistic, even divorced from time itself, mixing elements of different periods together. Characters from Wagner’s opera, Kundry, Klingsor, appear, make their contributions and disappear from the stage. Percival conjures miracles, but their effects are ultimately negative. A new chapter, a new setting: a utopian commune during the reformation; a journey through a central Europe destroyed in religious war; a brief sojourn in a gloomy castle, rescued by Gawain; an opulent, over-ripe palace ruled by an emperor on the tipping point between decline and fall. A final chapter: the narrator describes his encounter with ‘Faithful Henry’, Heinrich Himmler, and his perversion of the Parsifal legend.

‘Bear-King’, Duke of Burgundy, lost emperor, Heinrich Himmler – all meet or are influenced or are enchanted by Parsifal, or the idea of Parsifal, or of a grail or grails – and all are destroyed.

At times I felt that this novel was too rich and heady a confection: but in its moving final chapter, I felt vindicated that I had persevered to the end.

[Dan Sumption · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like a fever-dream - perhaps the strangest, tangliest novel I have ever read, I had to read and re-read each chapter several times, and even then I struggled with the sense of it, but I loved the writing, and can picture myself reading this book for the rest of my life.