This is the fourth novel in the Pagan series, after Pagan's Crusade, Pagan in Exile, and Pagan's Vows. This one takes place about 20 years after the last book, and it's also the only one not told from Pagan's point of view, which is why it took me so long to pick it up. But when I saw Jinks had published Babylonne, about Pagan's sixteen-year-old daughter, I had to read the final one before I could read it.In Pagan's Scribe, we meet Isidore, a young scribe who suffers from epilepsy in a time when people believed that meant he was cursed with a devil inside him. Pagan, now Archdeacon of Carcassonne, hires him as a scribe after seeing him in a tiny village where the boy's natural intelligence and love of books are being wasted. There are a lot of parallels between Isidore and Pagan as a child -- both are outcast, both intelligent, both outspoken, and both looking for someone to believe in them and someone to believe in, in turn. Isidore, on the other hand, is much more serious and straight-laced, which provides a nice contrast to Pagan's irreverent attitude. Pagan is off to help the local lords in southern France negotiate with the Crusaders encroaching on their lands, looking to burn out the heretic Cathars and Catholics harboring them, and Isidore is dragged off into a religious conflict he barely understands and violence the like of which he's never seen.I don't know why I was surprised by how good this book was, considering how much I loved the other three. It was interesting to get a look at Pagan as an adult from outside his character, kind of like seeing Eugeniedes from a distance in King of Attolia. (Yeah, I promise eventually there will be a book I don't liken to Turner's Queen's Thief series. Seriously. This is the last one.)This series is so, so good, and so unknown, and I wish I could make everyone read it. It's unusual in that it's extremely well-researched and rooted in the period -- you really get a sense of what it's like to live in the 12th and 13th centuries in Jerusalem and southern France -- but also contemporary in tone and wildly funny. Pagan in the beginning of the series is smart-mouthed, irreverent, intelligent, angry, and emotional, and by the fourth book he's developed and matured but retains those significant elements to his character. Pagan's devotion to God and his more worldly understanding of people has only grown and he's turned into a learned and effective orator. It's fitting that he takes in a boy who is similarly outcast, like he was, and tries to teach him like he was taught. Through Isidore, we also get to see how Roland's and Pagan's devotion to each other has aged and how strong it remains.Despite all the sarcasm and humor, however, this series has always been one with a lot of sadness -- terrible things happen to the characters because the Crusades were terrible, war is terrible, and ultimately all they can do is try to save the ones they love, and sometimes they can't even do that. Still, they endure, because they have too much heart to give up. The ending to this one is heart-breaking, but that's not a reason to avoid it; it's a reason to run right out and read all four.
Wow!I was initially disappointed that Jinks decided not to use Pagan as the narrator here, but after a while Isidore grew on me. He is almost the polar opposite of Pagan's personality, but that is mainly due to his inexperience and innocence. Isidore is also epileptic and since being abandoned at a monastery at a young age, has always believed that his fits are the work of a devil. With Pagan's help he will come to see that his fits are no such thing, that the world is not as black and white, right and wrong, as he believed and that book learning will only get you so far. We often see Pagan through Isidore's eyes (who sees him as arrogant, disrespectful, and anything but the archdeacon he is), but I can't help but wish we could see Isidore through Pagan's eyes. Set fifteen to twenty years after "Pagan's Vows", "Pagan's Scribe" tells of how Pagan, now an archdeacon set to try and convert Cathars back to Catholicism, takes Isidore as his scribe (Pagan, now in his thirties is loosing his eyesight and can no longer read or write) and sets off to try and act as intermediary in the coming Crusade within France. While I was reading the book I honestly thought that it wasn't as good as the others, but then the final battle comes, and OH MY LORD! I won't spoil anything but get out the tissues and prepare to walk away from the book heartbroken, feeling wrung out, and wowed. Catherine Jinks is clearly a master!
What do You think about Pagan's Scribe (2005)?
Decades on and here we are with Pagan again. But this time, we look at him through the eyes of another orphan, Isidore, who to start is a self-righteous, but cringing and tormented boy. You might be too if you had been told your whole life that your seizures were demonic possession. Pagan's older and wiser but his tongue-in-cheek wit has not faded. And yet again, we find him in the centre of a war zone. I'm not going to go too much into this one, because the exploration and growth of the new narrator, and how we the reader urge him to see Pagan for all his redeeming qualities, is part of the beauty of this book. But it's also part of the drawback: Pagan was just such a fantastic narrator.I think it also a kindness that we are not in Pagan's head when the climax hits. But I can tell you that I wept.
—Sophie Yorkston
For me, a book is all about the ending, but a series is mostly about development. And this final entry in the Pagan series delivers. I don't know if I'd recommend this to anyone other than people who like YA books with a setting in medieval Jerusalem/France, though. The whole series is an easy, fast read, with a good deal of wittiness, but it didn't grab me. It's pretty violent and brutal. I enjoyed seeing what became of Pagan in his lifetime, and what kind of man he turned out to be. I'm glad I finished out the series.
—Allison
