In The Gentle Infidel, Lawrence Schoonover takes the reader to 15th-century Turkey to witness the calamitous fall of Constantinople. As a young boy of Christian family, Michael is drafted into the sultan's elite military force, the janissaries. There he is converted to Islam and taught to regard his Christian childhood as a thing of shame. Michael is naturally talented and ambitious, quickly rising to commander though he is yet to win his name in a battle. But when he falls in love with the fourth wife of a powerful pasha, his life begins to change rapidly as he experiences passion, betrayal, revenge, and a final profound decision of which faith he really believes.

The women in his life, Aeshia and Angelica, of course represent Islam and Christianity respectively. Schoonover writes as impartially as he can, showing the faults of Christians as well as of Moslems, but I was never in much doubt as to which one Michael was going to choose. His conversion to Christianity, amidst the burning carnage of a Constantinople that he and his fellow janissaries helped take, is actually fairly believable.

I love historical fiction, but found it hard to relax into this novel at first. Schoonover writes well for the most part, but there is so much explaining to do about the cultures and customs of the time that he often pauses the narrative to give a paragraph of background information. The effect is rather clumsy. As the story progresses, those info-dumps lessen (or at least, I noticed them less). They are, in themselves, quite interesting glimpses in the mores of the time. I found the descriptions of everyday Christianity and Islam fascinating: the court etiquette, the divorce laws, the bloodthirsty ruthlessness of their religious and territorial wars, and of course the way that people of all levels creatively circumvented the more rigid requirements of their faith.

I'm not sure why, but somehow this novel reminded me of The Trumpeter of Krakow, the first Newbery Award winner also set in the Middle Ages. Maybe it was the diamonds or the sense of enemies all around, or just the general setting (though that's Poland). I should revisit that novel. Maybe that's a mark of good fiction, that it whets the appetite for more of the same.

I can't say this will ever become a big favorite of mine, but I enjoyed it enough to look for more of Schoonover's work and to recommend this as a competent fictional treatment of the fall of Constantinople. ( )