A Fifth of November

by Paul West

A suspenseful and uniquely literary look into Guy Fawkes and the English Gunpowder Plot of 1605, by one of America's most celebrated writers. In A Fifth of November , Paul West describes the events surrounding the English Gunpowder Plot (1605). Instigated by thirteen Catholic conspirators, most famously Guy Fawkes, the Plot was a failed attempt to blow up the English Parliament and King James I. At the heart of West's novel are the trials of Father Henry Garnet, superior of the English Jesuits, who is hidden from the king's henchmen behind the walls of English mansions. Shielding him from harm is the melancholy noblewoman Anne Vaux, a Catholic sympathizer. A Fifth of November tells the tale of it begins when he first hears of the plot the conspirators have confessed their plan to him, what is his responsibility?--to his imprisonment in the Tower of London. All along, the figures who partake of this historical moment are brightly, often horrifically, drawn. In A Fifth of November , West tackles through his rhapsodic language, brilliant characterizations, and historical precision that inevitable human evil.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published May 17, 2001

About the author

Paul West (February 23, 1930) was an English-born novelist, literary historian and poet, the author of 24 novels, who lived in America since the early 1960s. He resided in upstate New York with his wife, the writer, poet and well-known naturalist Diane Ackerman, until his death in 2015. Paul, still remembered with affection by his old colleagues and friends in England as a big, jolly man, was born in Eckington, which is near (and now considered a part of) Sheffield in South Yorkshire, but was during West’s childhood a Derbyshire village associated with the famous literary Sitwells of Renishaw.
Paul was honoured with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award (1985), the Lannan Prize for Fiction (1993), the Grand Prix Halperine-Kaminsky Award (1993), and three Pushcart Prizes (1987, 1991, 2003). He was also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Literary Lion (1987), and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters 1996, France).
His parents, Alfred and Mildred, really cared for books, and created an environment which ensured that young Paul inherited a great passion for literature, which was enhanced when he went from his native village to study first at Oxford University in England and later at Columbia University in America. He never lived in England again after going to Columbia, and in later years Paul was involved with other US universities in teaching roles, notably Pennsylvania State University.
Paul West’s novels have included: ‘A Quality of Mercy’ (1961); ‘Tenement of Clay’ (1965); ‘Alley Jaggers’ (1966); ‘I'm Expecting to Live Quite Soon’ (1970); ‘Bela Lugosi's White Christmas’ (1972); ‘The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg’ (1980); ‘Rat Man of Paris’ (1986); ‘The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper’ (1991); and ‘OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday’ (2000).
His non-fiction has included the autobiographical ‘I, Said the Sparrow’, a delightful essay on his Eckington childhood; ‘The Growth of the Novel’ (1959), ‘The Modern Novel’ (in 2 vols, 1963); ‘Robert Penn Warren’ (1964); ‘Words for a Deaf Daughter’ (1969); ‘A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-discovery’ (1995); and the remarkable ‘The Shadow Factory’ (2008), the aphasic memoir he dictated with such struggle and resolve –it brings tears to the eyes and admiration to the heart, as we are reminded in reading it of the courage of this man. It is a ‘must-read’ in the context of the terrible stroke he suffered in 2003. Paul’s wife, Diane, also wrote about that stroke and its consequences in her book ‘One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage and the Language of Healing’. Paul’s poetry collections include ‘Poems’ (1952), ‘The Spellbound Horses’ (1960), and ‘The Snow Leopard’ (1964).


Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel · Rating 2 out of 5]

A dense, vivid retelling of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot and its moral, political, and spiritual wreckage. The "story" centers on Father Henry Garnet, the Superior of the English Jesuits, who becomes entangled in the infamous Catholic conspiracy to blow up King James I and the English Parliament. When the plotters – Robert Catesby, Thomas and Robert Wintour, Guy Fawkes, Thomas Percy, and others – reveal their plan to him through confession, Garnet faces an impossible dilemma: the seal of confession forbids disclosure, but silence makes him complicit.

The novel begins with Garnet hiding in secret priest holes, ministered to by Anne Vaux, a pious and melancholy noblewoman who devotes her life to protecting him. Their relationship, though spiritual, carries an undertone of forbidden affection, as Anne becomes his guardian, companion, and emotional mirror. West follows Garnet's inner debates about faith, duty, and temptation while outside, the English state turns Catholic existence into treason.

The Gunpowder Plot itself builds through parallel scenes of intrigue, recruitment, and misplaced zeal. Catesby, charismatic and obsessive, leads the band of conspirators in a doomed attempt to restore Catholic dominance by annihilating Parliament on November 5. Guy Fawkes, the hardened soldier, is discovered in the cellars beneath Westminster with barrels of gunpowder, and the plot collapses overnight. The conspirators flee through the Midlands, attempting to rally Catholic support, but their efforts end in squalid violence: ambush, explosion, and execution.

As the failed rebels are hunted down, tortured, and killed, Garnet remains in hiding until he is captured and taken to the Tower of London. West's Garnet endures interrogation and moral torment with weary grace, defending the Jesuit principle of "equivocation", a theological tightrope between truth and survival.

His eventual trial and execution at Tyburn are rendered in macabre grandeur. Watching crowds jeer, Protestant clerics demand a final confession, and Garnet has to choose between life or betrayal of his faith.

West's novel turns the Gunpowder Plot into a meditation on conscience, secrecy, and the futility of fanaticism. It is by no means a straightforward historical chronicle but a confusing and convoluted moral symphony in which love, faith, and betrayal intertwine until all distinctions blur in smoke, martyrdom, and memory.

The novel is written with a fountain pen dipped in magic mushroom tea. It is magnificent, excessive, and exasperating ad nauseum in the same breath. West writes as if the English language itself were a divine punishment he refuses to repent for. The prose is lush, swollen, impossible to follow, and unashamed of its density. He builds entire paragraphs out of theological speculation, bodily discomfort, and intellectual torment, and he does it with a kind of lunatic obsession that very few writers can sustain.

The book is both brilliant and almost unreadable, but in a way that feels deliberate. West wants the reader to suffocate inside Garnet's conscience, to live in that cramped priest hole with him, to feel the damp of fear and the itch of guilt. He is not interested in history as drama but in history as disease. The plot of the Gunpowder Plot is almost secondary to the internal combustion of Garnet's faith. You watch a mind try to hold on to logic while surrounded by madness, repression, and hypocrisy.

West shows how both sides, Catholic and Protestant, are imprisoned by certainty. Garnet's moral dilemma becomes a parable about what happens when belief outruns compassion. West exposes the danger of living entirely inside one's own righteousness. Unfortunately the beauty and wisdom is buried too deep inside pompousity that achieves mostly frustration and boredom 😴


"...With an almost bestial crash the poursuivants come through the front door demanding and scanning, swords drawn, staffs at the ready, dogs quarrelling on the leash. Only to see nothing save some untitled sheet music, now gathered by the hands of a servant who seems to be tidying it up while Byrd warms his rear at the log fire, feeling the moisture rise behind him. Father Garnet, whisked through a little closet into yet another hidey-hole, squirreled himself away in a place no larger than a sedan chair; only after the first few hours will he begin to chafe
and ache. There he skulks, behind a door disguised as a folded-up screen. He hears them ferreting about, tapping and shouting. The dogs achieve nothing, strange to say, and he wonders if a whole generation of dogs has been born without any sense of smell in his presence. Perhaps a priest, at least in the early days of a hiding, has no smell at all - none of the camphor and attar of roses he has always thought is upon him. In mid-song he has been put away like a forbidden book and the tiny chorus disbanded into various household destinations, with Lady Anne Vaux at her most magistral insisting on offering the "king's gentlemen" a stoup cup, some cold beef, fruit and cordial. They refuse, but waste time on smiling obeisance; she dresses plainly, but her mind is all regalia. Her only worry today is Little John Owen, due to arrive to create a superior bolthole upstairs, a sentry-box in the nursery, ideal for children to play in, but kept from them lest they unwittingly reveal it.

They do not waste time on their swoop, which is over and done within an hour. The dogs no longer yap, the swords are put away, the staffs no longer probe or tip; all that remains of their bristling ingress, which is going to take too long to yield anything worthwhile, is suspicion. They have other houses to visit unannounced, arriving like cavalry and leaving as a cortege, all disappointment and blunted zeal. Only one search in ten yields anything, and that only in the poorest-prepared households, the ones with too much on show by way of altars and crucifixes. One day, Little John will finish his grand plan of reclamation and defense, equipping every recusant house with blatant cubbyholes designed to be found, concealing yet others
designed to be found half the time - the lairs behind the lairs - which in turn conceal the most closed places of all, accessible only to the most ambitious explorer. Nobody will ever be found again. He intends to secrete in the most fastidious way possible, if only they will remember the rules: no belching, no other body sounds, no easing of the joints, no chewing during a raid, shallow breathing, and of course not the slightest sneeze or cough. He half-dreads the day when the acutest poursuivants will be able to pick up the sacred vibrations of a soul attuning itself to God during the harsh hours of hiding after the first twenty-four, with no succor in sight, no food, no close stool, no water, but only a series of haphazard raids, sometimes three within two hours, then nothing for a day, then three more: an irregular irregularity. It is no thing to jest about. To be found will usually mean prison, the rack, and quite often the scaffold. To those priests most at risk it has become a wearisome fatuity, making them mouselike, champions of scurry and lie-low, a hide-and-seek with grotesque penalties. Father Garnet shrugs at potentates who conduct their countries thus, his educated skull recalling a phrase from Tacitus: "temptat clausa" - he tries all the closed things..."

You see what I mean?

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second last novel he published in his lifetime, A FIFTH OF NOVEMBER is also the final of Paul West’s many historical novels, a subsidiary strand running through the man’s body of work, part of that whole teeming corpus cobbled-together over the course of more than four decades and consisting of, in addition to novels that did or did nor deal with major historical events from eras variously distant, poems and essayistic non-fiction stuff and all sorts of disparate demonstrations of learning and acuity, the author’s overall ‘project,’ shall we say, having been characterized, in the words of Lore Segal, cited over at his Wiki, by “unsettling nonuniformity.” I have only recently discovered Paul West. It is the novels to which I have come first, my yen being what it is, many things attracting me to them, their “unsettling uniformity” and purportedly triumphant wordsmithery not the least of it. In short order I have acquired nine West first editions, two of them signed, three of them near impossible to think of as anything other than historical novels, and only one of them nominally non-fiction (though I also have that book’s sequel-of-a-sort, which curiously IS classified as fiction). I started with the Alley Jaggers trilogy, three novels published between 1966 and 1972, set close to contemporaneous with those years, and then read West’s final novel, 2003’s THE IMMENSITY OF THE HERE AND NOW: A NOVEL OF 9.11, which, contrary to what its title might lead one to believe, is ostensibly set in 2004, nearabouts the third anniversary of 9.11 and about one year after said novel’s publication. A FIFTH OF NOVEMBER is my fifth West, then, and the first of the historical novels. I also own first editions of 1980’s THE VERY RICH HOURS OF COUNT VON STAUFFENBERG, engineered around the 1944 inside-job attempt to assassinate Hitler, and 1991’s THE WOMEN OF WHITECHAPEL AND JACK THE RIPPER, whose title I would imagine to be self-explanatory. A FIFTH OF NOVEMBER, published in 2001 by New Directions (one of only three Wests the prestigious publishing imprint had occasion to shepherd), is a novel ostensibly about the infamous English Gunpowder Plot of 1605, commemorated annually in England in the form of Guy Fawkes Day, a morbid bit of arcane carnivalesque that persists to this day for some godforsaken reason, my sister, who lived in London for slightly more than a decade, confessing to me that she was never able to make head or tale of the whole ghastly business. The Gunpowder Plot, or Jesuit Treason, should you not be in the know, was a conspiracy to assassinate, or rather blow sky high, King James, the House of Lords, and everyone in it, carried very, very near to execution by a group of English Catholics led by Robert Catesby, the most famous conspirator being Guy Fawkes, who had fought in the Spanish Netherlands for the cause of the failed suppression of the Dutch Revolt, his legendary status no doubt attributable to his having been the bloke caught red-handed at the scene of the obstructed crime, surrounded by thirty-six barrels of oldschool ordnance, the makings of a hell of a payload. Neither Catesby, Fawkes, nor the eleven other central conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot are the principals in West’s novel, though they are certainly on the periphery, even popping in on occasion to go on the record. West will often refer to Fawkes as Guido Fawkes, the sobriquet a byproduct of the man’s earlier continental adventures, evidently true to the historical record, and Guido is granted a very squat bit of literary real estate in order to soliloquize: “It is I, custodian of the black powder.” The novel’s protagonist is actually Father Henry Garnet, real historical personage, originally of Derbyshire, ordained in Rome, by the early 17th century Jesuit superior of England, a somewhat clandestine role, a dangerous place and time. Garnet “thinks of himself as light.” He has “a Derbyshire quietness in his demeanor, betokening not the gruff intransigence of the Yorkshireman in the county next door,” but this quietness is complimented by “nerves of oak.” He is a serious theologian, if an oft pessimistic one, doubtlessly sobered considerably by his experiences, believing that “for the soul to speak, it should have a language of its own, pure and godly, unknown to humankind, and therefore blessing itself in blindest esoterica. Now, there’s just the kind of thought to get him damned, socially at least, hoicked out of his hidey-hole and hanged along with hundreds of other mildly dissenting churls.” God, he surmises, “presumes to some kind of power, making us invisible and yet, at the same time, even more spiritual than ever, more abstract, more distant, more creatures of the mind than of ritual, splendor, office.” Unlike Papist rebels Catesby and Guy Fawkes, hellbent on vengeance and conflagration, Father Garnet considers the “interests of diplomacy.” He has a secret and unseemly fixation, practically a botanist’s, regarding female genitalia, colouring as this does his close, intimate, but resolutely chaste relations with the devoted Anne Vaux, Catholic recusant and priest harbourer in her own right. Garnet also has an obsession with the limits of his own valour, bordering on prideful. What torture is he capable of withstanding? The question is not an especially abstract one, not even before the Plot fails and the conspirators are being rounded up. Garnet has seen with his own eyes priests hung and/or disemboweled. It’s the early 17th century after all: Shakesepare, jokingly referred to as Spokeshave at one point, is active producing masterpieces (OTHELLO, KING LEAR, and MACBETH will appear between 1604 and 1606); Protestantism has assumed its hegemonic consolidation, Rome on the outs; to end up hung, drawn, and quartered is an all-too-customary fate. Father Garnet has had occasion to counsel the would-be insurrectionists, and he has cautioned them against hasty measures sure to excite heavy reprisals. He has petitioned Rome for help in reasoning with the seditious cell. Garnet's seriousness insofar as concerns spiritual matters stands, as does Anne Vaux's, in contrast to the folly of the Catesby-Fawkes contingent as well as the predations of the Sate by way of its legislators, executives, administrators, and “poursuivants,” that latter terminology including what we might call secret police avant la lettre as well as your infiltrators and your informants. The State has intelligence organs, so to speak, and they shall prove crucial. Garnet, his own sisters nuns at Louvain, grapples legitimately with greater questions, beholden to higher sanctities, and the earthly sectarian fracas is parallel at best to the matters that actually…matter. Nourishment keeps body attached to soul, Garnet believes, and he experiences all of his struggles as a tugging in both direction, both toward the celestial and the earthly, the embodied. Our great novels about priests, whether authored by a Georges Bernanos or a J. F. Powers, have always been about the struggle to both retain faith and be adequate to that faith faced with the pressures of the earthly quotidian. A FIFTH OF NOVEMBER is in large part continuing that tradition. If Garnet has sexual urges and experiences doubt concerning his resolve, he is a man (very much a man) who might well on occasion attribute to dumb luck what we might expect a great Jesuit to imagine divine decree. It is in these moments that West seems most fully to capture the nobility of his tragic hero. Is is the chinks in the armour that are the true source of dignity and thus true strength, genuinely creatural fortitude. Contrary to both Papist and Protestant alike, Garnet’s is generally an encompassing, inclusive orthodoxy: “Infinitely curious about human kind, Father Garnet decides that the main fatuity consists in the way humans fix on what divides them rather than on what they hold in common.” If Garnet is fated to be executed by the State, this being a foregone conclusion, a matter of the historical record, the ultimate charge against him is not that he actually conspired with the plotters, no matter what underhanded smear tactics may be introduced, but rather that he refused to betray them to the State, his conundrum in this regard similar to that of Montgomery Clift’s Father Michael Logan in Hitchcock’s I CONFESS, a belief in the sanctity of the confessional ultimately handed over to juridicial scrutiny and/or broadly legalistic personal anxieties. For a time, Garnet lives in hiding, like the gunpowder conspirators and so many English Catholics directly before him, in “priestholes,” “hiding month after month in abysmal quarters unfit for animals.” Eventually he is captured, remanded into custody, made to face trial and invidious damnation. His main persecutors are Edward Coke and the Machiavellian Robert Cecil, “these militant Saxons,” Cecil something like Garnet’s dark double, provocateur and angler, sinister confessor. “Cecil, the trimmer, adjusts his sights, supporting James of Scotland for two years of sedulous cultivation, secret of course—just the sort of ministration Father Garnet wants to bring to bear on the hothead plotters: gradual, temperate suasion, with Garnet the most agile cajoler ever seen.” Garnet is answerable for nothing more than “guilt by association,” and his captors doubtlessly know it, though this will not and cannot stop them from drumming up more salacious charges. Garnet is interrogated endlessly, tortured on the rack. He turns in captivity toward the prodigious intake of palliative sack, human all too human. There is a show trial. “Father Garnet knows it is useless arguing…” Coke calls Garnet the serpent and Anne Vaux Eve. It is all horseshit bluster, nakedly so. A Yorkshire (or maybe Norse, “right from the Vikings”) expression: “we’ll eat a peck of muck before we die.” Whatever his doubts concerning his capacity for forbearance, Garnet’s nobility will withstand the destruction of his flesh, a fact not lost on the onlookers, the tableau bone-chilling. “Father Garnet is going to die, he now knows, having denied what an eternity-bound man does not need, and no amount of chivvying and pestering on the scaffold by Protestant prelates is going to sway him. He is all direction, and speed, not theirs, not his, not hers, but a mote hieing.” Shortly before the insidious wheels of so-called justice produce the foregone conclusion, we will be asked to consider how "We Catholics are always attentive to the dying we do, from day to day, then at the end.” But something of Father Garnet remains after his mortal life is stamped out, and THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER goes to great length in its final pages to enshrine this with dexterous profundity, Anne Vaux, who has escaped execution, custodian of this jewel of a legacy we have access to the weighty consideration of here in the ignoble 21st century, both by way of West’s novel and beyond it. Think of the Guy Fawkes mask, immortalized I guess anew in Alan Moore’s graphic novel V FOR VENDETTA, the dubious Hollywood movie adapted from it, and the subsequent ubiquitous appropriation of that mask by the decentralized hacktivist organization (or quasi-organization) Anonymous. (Alan Moore also wrote FROM HELL, a graphic novel concerning, uh, the Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper.) In Moore’s graphic novel there are a pair of panels in which a spectre in the mask declaims that “THERE’S NO FLESH OR BLOOD WITHIN THIS CLOAK TO KILL. IDEAS ARE BULLET-PROOF.” Perhaps the “eternity-bound” Garnet, pulled between the earthly-embodied and the celestial, can be read less as a pious man mindful of salvation in the eternal hereafter than as a creature of the earth in communion with ideas, a veritable receptacle of ideas and connoisseur of same, these being ideas he has helped to spread, to imbue with new depths of ineradicable import, immortal ideas, or at least bullet-proof, that will live long after his individual candle has been cruelly snuffed. THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER is constructed in such a way that futurity is explicitly on the table. There is a passage, for example, in which Vauxhall is noted to be the future site of a “famous car factory,” and a later, lengthier one, pages 128 and 129, in which Cecil is compared to Joseph Goebbels. We might also consider that the novel, West’s penultimate, was originally published just short of four months before the attacks of September 11, 2001, subject, more or less, of his ultimate. The reprisals and invective that have targeted Muslims in the 21st century, a terrorist attack evidently conducted by a fanatical cell having played with pronounced instability into the themselves unstable hands of hegemony, bear a certain stink, and analogous one, as it were, to the miasmic odeur blanketing the first decade of 17th century England. Eternal return of the same mixed with a little difference and repetition. I think of Little John, his real Christian name Nicholas, workman, helpmeet to Garnet and Lady Anne: “life is too short, so is he.” It’s a good line. It is playful, a little flippant, product of West's superhuman literary grace, fun grace, ebullient, emblematic as such. In some sense it might also be erroneous. Very little John is very huge indeed, and life is so much bigger than our circumscribed socially mediated environs. You are never for a moment anywhere that history is not available to be pried impossibly open, the whole of it too massive to assimilate as anything like manageable datum, the eternal the constituent firmament, it's non-container. And Little John there, a minor character in a Paul West, standing in for all sublimity of impossible scale, a jewel I am inspecting in my hand. Impossible hugeness in the palm of my hand. Canada. February 2020.

[Angela · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this as part of my "book of the month" reading challenge, so didn't really know much about it (apart from it was supposed to be a re-telling of the Gunpowder plot). It's not really a straightforward historical fiction novel. It reminds me a bit of Hilary Mantel's approach with her Thomas Cromwell series. However, I just could not engage with this story. It barely touches on the Gunpowder plot, and instead focuses mostly on one of the Catholic priests hiding from authorities. His inner dialogue gets tedious pretty quickly. Little John and Anne Vaux are far more interesting characters, but are kept more at the periphery. Would only recommend if you are really super interested in this time period.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read only one other book by Paul West, and both Terrestrials and A Fifth of November show him to be a writer intoxicated as much by his subject as by the words he uses. Expecting more of the post-modern guessing games about who is actually writing the novel, which figured prominently in Terrestrials, I was pleasantly surprised to see I was dealing with a straight forward narrative about the Gunpowder Plot and Father Henry Garnet, superior of the English Jesuits, who is by association implicated in the events.

The novel makes clear the schism that ran through English life at the time, that despite more than a century of Protestantism, the country was still riven by religion, and persecution. A novel like this makes clear that the events behind England's fun-filled annual celebration of effigies, bonfires, and fireworks on November 5th have been blithely forgotten, and that the supposed conspiracy was half baked and worked into a fever pitch crisis of state by political figures intent on maintaining unquestioned power, exerted with force and torture, with bodies mangled and maimed and displayed with bloody glee.

Father Henry Garnet's personal predicament is made all the worse because he is innocent, which is of little concern when it comes time to expunge from the country the Jesuitical influences that "conspire" against James I.

[Gabriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was beautiful.

[Ddoyle90 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very dense inner thoughts of priest and priest hider during Guy Fawkes conspiracy.

[Hobart Frolley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was well written, but I just couldn't get into it. It reminded me somewhat of The Temptation Of Saint Anthony by Flaubert but a bit drier.

[Erika March · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took a while to get into the book, like 200 pages, but enjoyed it none the less. The ending is what made the book.