“If I think of someone constantly, does it then mean that I am in love? Or does it mean I have been possessed, bewitched? Perhaps it is the same thing. Perhaps all women are witches at heart.”
All The Parts Of The Soul is my first historical novel, set in Switzerland in 1545. This was a turbulent time; Geneva had recently defeated Savoy but peace was fragile, and there were repeated outbreaks of plague. Geneva had declared itself Protestant in 1536 and was regarded as the ‘Protestant Rome’, presided over by spiritual leader John Calvin.
All The Parts Of The Soul is based on a true story – a series of witch trials that took place in Geneva in 1545. I discovered fragments relating to these incidents in the city archives, and pieced together the story for myself. Many of the characters, such as Calvin, Anton Froment, and Marie Dentière, are based on real people.
The story has an unreliable and increasingly controversial narrator; I decided to write it from a male perspective, which allowed me to study the nature of misogyny, and to illustrate some of the ways in which women have been written out of history. Some readers will find this book shocking, upsetting, violent… but I didn’t need to embellish any of the facts. All The Parts Of The Soul is just a snapshot of the staggering hypocrisy and cruelty of which human beings were capable. And sometimes I wonder if we have come very far at all at all since then.
Exclusive extract:
‘What would you do, sir, if you were on the rack, with nothing left to lose - would you reveal your true feelings?’
Perhaps this was the moment when I could have… when I should have… but I had no answer, and she became agitated again, her face darkening. The rain had begun to fall, fat individual drops, and I was vaguely aware of grumblings from the guards and the wails of the prisoners. But I could only stand and look at Louise, blinking back the rain as she hardened her voice.
‘Your worshipped Calvin. Has he ever been tortured? Has he ever faced an impossible choice between Heaven and Hell?’
‘That is precisely what he faces!’
‘Come, sir. He is on a pedestal. So divorced is he from the realities of hardship.’
‘It is not only poor people who know suffering.’
‘You are right. I’m sorry. I… I just don’t want it to be you. I don’t want it to be you that does this. I want it to be someone else. So that I can still feel…..’
Still feel what? I waited breathlessly, but we were interrupted.
‘Come on! Magistrate! It will be dark soon!’
The moment was lost, and her urgency on behalf of the prisoners returned.
‘Your Calvin is a coward! He would never martyr himself. Did he stay in France to face his detractors? No, he ran away to Geneva, to re-invent himself as a hero. You see how he abandoned his friend Froment? People become nothing to him. You should not trust him the way you do.’
‘I shall forgive and pretend I never heard that.’
‘I do not take it back.’
I swung myself onto the horse and looked back at her.
‘I do not take it back. I do not take it back!’ She fell on to her knees sobbing, her skirts falling around her in the mud, the rain driving now and plastering strands of hair around her face. I turned around on the horse a few times, indecisive, and then set off after the prisoners. There was nothing else to be done. It couldn’t be helped.
“May I never be cured! Let my heart never be brought into the light! How could I ever lay open my inmost thoughts and affections? Let my particular infirmities fester like the delicious wounds they are. I shall never give them up.”
All The Parts Of The Soul will be published by Quill & Crow Publishing House in October 2023.
All The Parts Of The Soul - trailer