The Voyage of the Short Serpent

The time is the Middle Ages, the place is Greenland. Inquisitor Montanus has been assigned to reclaim the lost colony of New Thule for the Catholic Church. Perched on the top of the world, New Thule has strayed from the straight and narrow. Sodomy and bigamy, Montanus learns, are widespread; so, horrifically, are incest and cannibalism. Told in an elegant, compulsive, and increasingly unhinged style, Bernard du Boucheron's "The Voyage of the Short Serpent" is a masterpiece about human morality in inhuman conditions - a parable about truth, obsession, and the myth of Utopia.