Early in Matrix, Lauren Groff’s stunning new novel, Marie of France recalls a nightingale that Queen Eleanor had raised by hand, caged among the ladies of the English court. She despises this bird, which sings the same song, unlike the wild birds that Marie knew from her days when her mother and aunts were alive, free and fierce to pursue a life away from the strictures of court and the stringent roles of the ladies there. Marie herself defies easy categorization, as both bastard and royal, the product of rape from the lanky Plantagenet king and her Amazonian French mother. After her beloved mother dies and her relatives claim her farm, Marie is summoned to the court of the magnificent and powerful Queen Eleanor, her stepmother of sorts, for a likely future of marriage, babies and routine. But Marie, giant and ugly to the ladies of the court, better suited to fighting on horseback and bearing something of the fairy Melusine whose blood all women in her family are rumored to carry, is better suited to life in a convent, and is promptly appointed prioress at a remote royal abbey where most of the nuns have starved and the remaining sisters are seemed destined to follow. It is here that Groff portrays Marie thinking of the caged nightingale and the caged nuns singing their own songs within their chamber that Marie comes to an understanding about the life fate has left her.
And what a life it is. Marie’s vow begins in spite against those who have denied her her independence, but it turns into one of majesty and might—traits Marie knows she can wield but will take a lifetime of effort to reveal to the world. The abbey, meant to shut her and her fellow sisters away from the world, becomes her locus of power; the nuns’ weaknesses are parlayed into strengths and the wealth and reach of the abbey grows. But beyond the material wealth of her abbey, Marie builds, based on a series of apparitions she witnesses, a world apart from the ravages of the twelfth century world beyond: women dead in childbed, the constant threat of plague and illness, the rabid ravage of war and its slower twin greed. Men do not figure except as looming threats, predators that must be expelled. Protected at the heart of its own labyrinth, literally, Marie and her sisters preside over their own Garden of Eden, albeit without Adam or his ilk, eventually indeed without even the authority of the Pope and his priests. But like Eden, there is a serpent lurking.
While there was a twelfth century poet known as Marie de France, so little is known of her that Groff is given free rein to imagine her life. She does so in soaring sentences, achieving a balancing act between the sacred determination of Marie and her very earthy sensibilities. In Marie’s mind there can be no salvation without sin, no Mary without Eve, and Groff elegantly mines these contradictions to make Marie and her 800-years-gone world startlingly modern and universal. After Marie’s death, her fellow sisters debate whether she was a saint or a sinner. With Groff’s exquisite Matrix, the answer is: unforgettable.