Gutenberg’s Apprentice
In Christie’s stellar debut, we become observers to the birth of one of the greatest inventions of man – the printing press. What is immediately clear is not merely how miraculous that invention was, but how incredible, and improbable, that the invention ever saw the light of day.
Peter Schoeffer is about to reach his goal of becoming a successful scribe in 15th-century Paris when his foster father, Johann Fust, summons him back to Mainz, Germany, corrupted by the Elders, the guilds and the church. Fust, a wealthy merchant, is bankrolling Johann Gutenberg’s revolutionary – and perhaps blasphemous – invention and orders Schoeffer, who he saved from certain poverty, to become the maniacal, manipulative inventor’s apprentice. Schoeffer is resentful at being forced to leave behind everything he has worked for, to apprentice to a man whose invention he believes will destroy the scribe’s relationship with the Holy Word. In time, though, as his skill develops, he becomes dedicated to the venture and finally comes to realize that spreading the Holy Word through printed Bibles is also doing God’s work.
We have been taught a partial truth – that Gutenberg invented printing. His workshop’s long, hard labor was critical to the process, making the master’s concept a reality, while Schoeffer’s genius was in taking a mechanical process and creating art. The printing and marketing of those 180 Bibles, against virtually insurmountable odds, is awe-inspiring. Christie steers us through political, religious and personal upheavals using third-person narrative, intermittently shifting to first person where we hear directly from Schoeffer 30 years later in interviews with Trithemius, the abbot of Sponheim Abbey. The novel is at times dense with historical events, at times dealing more personally with Schoeffer and his own struggles; Christie does a masterful job in juggling both. The result is a highly recommended novel.
