Word: costains
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...nonfiction books passed the 100,000 mark, creating the kind of bookstore traffic that carried along many more modest titles. In fiction, it was a year not of newcomers but of oldtimers. The big sellers were the big names, the reassuringly familiar quantities-Hemingway, Steinbeck, Du Maurier, Keyes, Costain, Ferber...
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...
...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...
...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...