Mahmoud Ezzedine, a talented physician to the Ottoman sultan, did not want to be included in a diplomatic mission to the backwater kingdom of England. Only his duty to the sultan (you can’t say no to the the sultan and keep your head on your shoulders) got him on the boat. Arthur Phillips’s melancholy novel, The King at the Edge of the World, chronicles Ezzedine’s woebegotten sojourn in the courts of Elizabeth and James I.
Ezzedine arrives in London in 1591 and is far from impressed. The English are decades if not centuries behind the times when it comes to medicine and the natural sciences. Their kingdom is not nearly as rich as the Ottoman Empire. Worst of all, they’re misguided Christians who squabble violently over Protestant and Catholic dogma that baffles the devoutly Muslim Ezzedine. He’s been counting down the days until he can return home to his wife and child. Unfortunately, Ezzedine discovers too late that he’s been dragged along by a rival who covets Ezzedine’s happiness. He’s also hopelessly naive and unable to speak diplomatically; he’s can’t help but answer honestly when someone asks him a question. When Ezzedine attends an English noble who suffers an epileptic fit in front of the queen, his fate is sealed: the ambassador gifts Ezzedine to Elizabeth to get the inconvenient man off his hands.
Ten long years of exile pass before politics and religion—in the form of Geoffrey Belloc, a former agent of Sir Francis Walsingham—return for Ezzedine. He’s spent the decade caring for the same nobleman with epilepsy (gifted by Elizabeth since she didn’t really know what to do with him either). Belloc believes that only an outsider can settle a question that has been plaguing the nation now that the queen’s health is finally failing: is James of Scotland a secret Catholic or a true Protestant? Belloc has a plan for getting Ezzedine into the king’s inner circle and, somehow, settle the question definitively. Ezzedine was coerced into converting to Christianity but every English person he meets looks at him askance, as if he’s still Muslim. They press him to drink wine, eat pork, and attend Church, even ten years after his baptism. (Phillips really puts the miserable Ezzedine through the wringer.) Perhaps James can sympathize with someone also caught between faiths.
Belloc tantalizes the now aged doctor with the possibility of returning home to Constantinople at last as a reward for learning the truth about James. The years have not been kind to Ezzedine, though he has definitely learned to be more circumspect with his words even if he doesn’t know how to get people to give him their secrets. And I got the impression that Belloc’s questions about James’s true religion still puzzle Ezzedine. It doesn’t help that Belloc’s tips on identifying Catholics rely as much on propaganda as they do about the finer points of transubstantiation.
Phillips gives us plenty to think about when it comes to the differences of belief and education that separate people by revealing just how illusory many of them are. Ezzedine, for example, is able to teach people in the nobleman’s household about better hygiene (eventually). He is also able to earn James’s trust in his medical abilities. On the other hand, Belloc and many of the English persist in their fierce hatreds of anyone who is practicing Christianity the wrong way. And Ezzedine remains an outsider no matter how many people he treats or how reasonably he talks about how he’s acquired his knowledge. Ironically, the thing all of these characters have—Christian or Muslim, Catholic or Protestant, English or Scottish or Ottoman—in common is pig-headed stubbornness.