A medieval world rich in languor, intrigue, and lies

The Ruby in Her Navel
By Barry Unsworth
Nan Talese/Doubleday, 399 pp., $26

Running beneath the magical shifts and devices of Barry Unsworth's spacious new novel is a bitter tale of history missing a chance at redemption and settling for its usual destructive bottom line.

Set in the Kingdom of Sicily in the 12th century, it is told as a local confrontation of Islam and the West, with tragedy as the victor and hope as the victim. But to a theme that dismally foreshadows our own time, Unsworth joins a habitual literary dazzle. His story is a play of lights and darknesses, literal as well as figurative, and at times edging the surreal.

They give lift and enchantment to the novel's vortex of betrayals within betrayals, and conspiracies within conspiracies. They toss and swirl around the hero, a lethally naive and only part-innocent young striver, whose moral code is a smudge of honor, passionate ambition, and ambitious passion.

"The Ruby In Her Navel" takes place in one of the Middle Ages' many short-lived arrangements: the Normans' rule of Sicily after they seized it from the Saracen Arabs. Roger, the visionary Norman king, has established a court that cultivates learning, patronizes the arts, and endeavors to impose harmony among the island's disparate peoples: the Muslims; the Christian communities of Normans, Lombards, and Greeks; and the Jews.

Harmony is under perilous strain. The Norman knights who brought Roger's father to power resent the high places in government and the military which the son has given the Arabs. Graver threats from the outside play upon these divisions.

The Byzantine and Holy Roman emperors both regard Sicily as rightfully theirs, and fair prey to expansionist compulsions bearing no small resemblance to the takeover impulses of today's late-stage capitalism. The papacy, with a hardening conviction of its universality, growing intolerance of tolerance, and secular might of its own, withholds full recognition of Roger's multicultural kingship. Sicily has become a tumbling piece in the bloody kaleidoscope of medieval history.

So have the two central figures in "Ruby." Yusuf, a powerful Muslim courtier, runs the Diwan of Control, a combination of royal budget office and espionage service. Thurstan Beauchamp, son of a Norman knight and brought up to hope for knighthood himself, has been chosen by Yusuf for a different ascent: through the tortuous inner workings of the court bureaucracy. He is Yusuf's protégé, and possible successor should the older man rise to become court chamberlain.

Youthful and bumptious, Thurstan is a churn of contradictory ambitions. Part of him still longs for his feudal knightly heritage; another part glories in the perks and prospects offered by his court mentor and patron. Meanwhile, his tasks range from organizing royal entertainments to conducting clandestine missions for Yusuf.

A journey to Calabria and Bari, related in exuberant colors, has him acquiring cagefuls of cranes for the royal falcon hunt and hiring Nesrin, a free-spirited Anatolian belly dancer -- she of the be-rubied navel and eventually his severe and redeeming love -- for the court revels.

He goes on to deal with a Serbian agent bribed to organize an uprising to divert the Byzantine forces from an attack on Sicily. Then, seemingly by chance, he meets a childhood sweetheart, now a wealthy widow, and falls dizzily in love. He finds himself taken up not only by her, equally dizzy -- again seemingly -- but by her powerfully maneuvering Norman relatives.

Unsworth has made Thurstan brash and confident, and only in agonizing retrospect aware of the dazzling traps set for him. They will ensnare him and, through him, shamefully, his patron. Yusuf, who lives by perpetural wary calculation, had vainly reproached Thurstan's dangerous sunniness, warning him that truth-- and survival -- are invariably found in the shadows.

The figure of the Arab official emerges with brilliant subtlety and a tragic intuition of his destiny. Representing the flower of a fading civilization, he devotes his schemes, his cunning, his maneuvers, to trying to shore up King Roger's multicultural vision. His cultivation of Thurstan represents both an ideal and a stratagem: an effort to fight sectarian divisions, soon to grow fatal, by bringing a Christian Norman into his Muslim power center.

Everything will betray and be betrayed: love, ambition and stratagem. Unsworth sets out plots and the plots that undermine them with a rare join of head-splitting intricacy, taut suspense, and surreal images of foreboding: lights that cast shadows, bright mirrors that reflect dark doubleness. Thurstan, renouncing ambition, will finally manage an escape -- the book's only glibness, though winningly portrayed -- by summoning up an old gift, replacing ambition with art, and becoming a wandering troubadour.

What remains, though, hanging over the end, are grief and history's indifference. King Roger, threatened by his enemies, had discarded the mantle of reconciliation and exchanged it for a prudent sectarian armor. Yusuf and, indirectly, Thurstan have been crushed by it. Kingship, after all, is the permanent choice of kings, outlasting seasonal variations. As the Elizabethan diplomat Sir Henry Wotton wrote: "Then since Fortune's favors fade / You That in her arms do sleep, / Learn to swim and not to wade; / For the Hearts of Kings are deep."

Richard Eder reviews books for several publications.