Books: A Wrestle with the Grail

THE SILVER CHALICE (533pp.)—Thomas B. Costain—Doubleday ($3.85).

Novelist Thomas Costain has taught history to more people outside the classroom than any professional historian has ever taught inside. His swashbuckling sagas, The Black Rose and The Moneyman, not only gave readers a bowing acquaintance with the courts of Kublai Khan and medieval France, but made Costain himself the contemporary king of historical romance. To the fans who have bought nearly 5,000,000 copies of his eight books, King Costain can do no wrong, but the sad truth about his latest novel, The Silver Chalice, is that it rarely swashes and regularly buckles.

Tired of “all the Arthurian tripe about the Holy Grail,” Novelist Costain has written his own version of what happened to the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper. His hero is Basil of Antioch, a low-born artisan hired by Joseph of Arimathea to fashion a silver casing to hold the homely original. While young Basil is still wrestling with clay models, he also begins a long wrestle with sacred and profane love in the persons of 1) Deborra, the rich Christian girl he marries, and 2) Helena, a toothsome pagan baggage who has bewitched him with a love potion.

The potion seems to stymie both girls. It keeps Basil too cool toward Deborra to consummate his marriage and not warm enough toward Helena to make more than a mental pass at her throughout the book. But it does help Basil get his work done. He rattles around the Mediterranean world from Jerusalem to Antioch to Rome in order to see saints and apostles like Mark, Luke, John, Peter and Paul, and etch their images on the chalice. These holy men wear their hair and their platitudes long. Together with Author Costain’s lumbering, pseudo-Biblical style, they reduce the pace of The Silver Chalice to the gait of a lame camel. Occasionally, the inferior doings are spiced up with superior settings, e.g., Nero’s sycophantic court, a gladiatorial breakfast, Jerusalem’s Dock of Atonement.

When Nero, in a fit of rage, orders the Praetorian Guard to toss Helena from a tower, Basil heads home to faithful little Deborra, who is waiting for him back in Antioch. In no time, they are walking the dog together and billing & cooing over a hoped-for manchild. As for the chalice, it is soon stolen, never to be seen again, but a “miracle” enables Basil to finish the casing: he sees, and carves on it, a vision of Jesus. Author Costain’s own vision of all this comes pretty close to reducing early Christianity to soap opera.