The Galley Slave

Jancar’s 1978 novel (part of Dalkey Archive’s Slovenian Literature series) is a vivid, dense, atmospheric tale set in the brutal medieval age of the Inquisition. A hapless stranger in a nameless land flees before the “plague commissars,” who put up roadblocks and interrogate travelers, compel him to take refuge in a town where it seems that his every move is being watched. The land is overrun by forces of suspicion and terror, and the stranger, Johan Ot, is likely hiding some darkness from his own past, revealed in nocturnal ravings that alert the neighbors to a guilty conscience—or an inner demon. “Darkness and flames and blood everywhere, with people always concealing evil intentions,” Jancar narrates in the foreboding voice of the omniscient moral police. The net of the Inquisition tightens: Ot is captured, interrogated, and brutally tortured until he confesses to having “some sort of devil... in me.” Excommunicated from the Church, he vanishes, or is perhaps spirited away by an underground apostate brotherhood, resurfacing amid renegades plotting to bring down the “snot-nosed little emperor,” Leopold. Yet the doomed Ot is again captured and sentenced to become a galley slave “for the rest of his natural life.” Jancar depicts the insidious gloom of this society with the intimacy of someone acutely aware of how the repressive tentacles of an authoritarian regime can rob individuals of their destiny. (Dec.)