Salvation: Scenes from the Life of St. Francis » (REPRINT)

Valerie Martin is the author of six novels and two collections of short fiction, including Italian Fever and Mary Reilly, and a biography of St. Francis, Salvation. She resides in upstate New York.

Inspired by the fresco cycles that depict the life of St. Francis of Assisi, acclaimed author Valerie Martin tells the life of Francesco di Pietro Bernardone in a series of vividly realized “panels” of moments both crucial and ordinary. Drawing from myriad sources and moving in reverse chronological order, she begins in the dark, final days, with a suffering Francesco on the verge of death, then shows us the unwashed and innocent revolutionary, unafraid to lecture a pope on Christ’s message. We see his mystical friendship with Chiara di Offreducci, a nobleman’s daughter who turns her back on the world to join him, and finally, the frivolous young Francesco on the deserted road where his encounter with a leper leads him to an ecstatic embrace of God. Salvation is at once an illuminating glimpse into the medieval world and an original and intimate portrait of the man whose legend has resonated through the centuries.

Valerie Ryan

An unusual look at the life and times of St. Francis...[and] a contemporary homage to the anonymous 14th Century collection of tales of St. Francis and his followers known as "The Little Flowers of St. Francis." . . . Martin has a great touch for vivid detail, for landscape settings, for qualities of light and times of day. Her scene of the saint's hallucinatory encounter with demons has terrific immediacy, clarity and humor. Her evocation of the hollow silence that swallows a band of crusaders as they enter a besieged city whose inhabitants have been murdered by the plague is ghostly and chilling. If Martin's handling of her subject matter were a style of art, it would be International Gothic, decorative, her outdoor scenes bejeweled with sparkling dew. An aesthetic St. Francis is one who commands our attention, who draws us irresistibly toward a still point of wonder and self-reflection.