Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling, Marina Warner, William Collins, £22

In his 1999 memoir, Mein Leben, the German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki tells of how in June 1943 he and his wife Teofila escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and found refuge in the suburban home of a Protestant typesetter, Bolek, and his wife Genia. The fugitives worked all day rolling contraband cigarettes in the cellar in return for meagre handouts of food. Then, at Genia’s prompting, Marcel started telling stories. He ransacked his memory for the plots of every novel or story, every play, opera or film he had ever encountered. He did this for months; the better the story the more food they received, the safer they felt.

As Warner notes in Sanctuary, her new book exploring the properties of the ancient concept of sanctuary and their relevance to the contemporary global migrant crisis, Reich-Ranicki’s account is a remarkable real-life version of an old narrative framing device. The best-known example of the latter is The Thousand and One Nights, in which Shahrazad (or Scheherazade) must entertain the sultan with a new story every night to save herself from execution in the morning. In both the fictional and the real worlds, the act of storytelling creates a safe space for the storyteller while also working to transform, to enlarge, the compassion of the listener.

That there is a global crisis is of no doubt. Warner cites 2024 figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which report the number of ‘forcibly displaced’ people worldwide to be 122.6 million, of whom 37.9 million are refugees – or, to use Warner’s preferred term, ‘arrivants’. The idea that some form of safe space can be fashioned from story is a powerful one; Reich-Ranicki’s experience attests to that. But how does it relate to sanctuary as it existed in the distant past, and how can the concept of sanctuary be formulated to address the scale of the challenge faced in the 21st century?

The book begins with a quick historical tour of sanctuary in the classical and medieval worlds. In both cases, Warner notes, ‘a fugitive from their enemies or from the arm of the law was protected by the prestige of the sacred’. Whether the fugitive was innocent or guilty was beside the point: they received divine protection. In medieval England, sanctuary was understood to be time-limited, a moment of reprieve, a breathing space while passions cooled. Typically, it might last 40 days. At that point the fugitive had to choose between facing the judgment of the law or public penance and exile.

Warner is uncomfortable with the ‘prestige of the sacred’, however. She was raised in the Catholic faith, she tells us, but left it in her late teens, and her preferred definition of ‘the ancient law of sanctuary [is as] a safe place instituted by words, by consensus around a story’. Although breaches of sanctuary certainly occurred – most infamously, perhaps, the murder of Thomas Becket before the altar at Canterbury – the divinely ordained and therefore unchanging assurance of sanctuary was surely central to its authority. Sanctuaries were secured by fear of divine punishment at their violation. To characterise that as merely a function of consensus is to miss its power. It misses what enabled sanctuaries to offer protection.

Warner wishes to fold the old idea of sanctuary into the wider Foucauldian concept of heterotopias, bounded places within society that function with their own set of rules: she sees analogies with museums, art galleries, and theme parks, for instance. But this is an abstraction; we have moved a long way from the physical safeties of sanctified space here. Isn’t it safety, above all, that arrivants seek, not Alton Towers?

Five chapters follow, each of which explores what Warner regards as a ‘case study in the possible scope of sanctuary’. They cover the flight of the holy family into Egypt; St Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, and her role in distributing the relics of the True Cross across the Roman Empire; the Santa Casa, where the Annunciation took place, later miraculously transported from the Holy Land to Loreto in Italy; Dido and Aeneas; and the story of Turandot. Much of the material in these sections, interesting though it may be, seems at best tangential to the main argument of the book.

The most successful is the first. Warner offers a moving account of the holy family in exile – fugitive, itinerant, homeless – sketched in the Gospel of Matthew, but elaborated in the Apocrypha. In particular, she notes the story’s resonance in both Christian and Muslim tradition – at once textual and imaginative – and the way in which belief has mapped the story onto the physical landscape and created sites of pilgrimage.

At a place called Matariyya – now in the outskirts of Cairo – the family rested and, according to one Arabic text, Mary washed the infant Christ’s linen. From his sweat and tears that she scattered, balsam trees – the literal source of balm – sprang up. Pilgrims came in great numbers for centuries. A place of physical sanctuary for the holy family became across time another, spiritual, kind of sanctuary for others; and through balm the blessing spored and spread through Christendom and Islam alike. Might this be, Warner asks ‘a model of the way a story held in common can work to build conviviality?’ – by which she means peaceful co-existence.

The chapter on Turandot, meanwhile, works to nudge the book towards Warner’s destination. She traces the story’s course from Persia in the early 13th century and its first appearance in The Pavilion of the Seven Princesses by El Nizami to Puccini’s opera, which was first produced posthumously in 1926. It is less the story’s particular qualities that she is interested in – love, riddles, a princess, power – than its embodiment of what she calls literary nomadism, its ability to migrate across boundaries and borders, centuries and cultures. ‘It is a story in diaspora’, she writes, using what to me is an unattractive neologism, ‘one of many spories – story pods, story seeds, story burrs – in world literature.’

The books closing chapters are where the substance of its argument is, and it isn’t always easy to follow. It read to me as an extended attempt to wrestle this metaphoric analogy of diasporic stories and diasporic peoples into life – or rather, into some kind of replicable process for creating empathic space. ‘My contention – my hope – is that thinking with stories can bring into being a country of words beyond the borders of nation and language’, Warner writes, ‘that the shared invention and retelling of stories, performed and recited and animated, can… help individual and social survival, connect a remembered past with present circumstances and build relations in the future.’

The sanctuary she ultimately proposes, then, is more a psychological space than anything else. In that respect it seemed to this reader to be a retreat. The retreat is threefold. In a positive sense, it is a spiritual retreat, a respite from emotional and other kinds of duress and torment. But it is surely a practical retreat, too, a different and lesser kind of safety compared to the spatial and material security offered by ancient forms of sanctuary – and indeed compared to the very real political, economic and cultural sanctuary that Europe offers large numbers of legal migrants from beyond its borders every year. Then again, it seems to this reader to be an intellectual retreat from the immense practical and ethical challenges of mass migration in an age of national states, disputed resources and rising global tension.

Warner cites a line from the poet Denise Riley as an epigraph: ‘What hope is there of a purely secular grace?’ Sanctuary is a complex book, by turns subtle and eloquent, opaque and digressive, thoughtful and moving. I ended it in lower spirits than I began it. Whatever hope there is in Warner’s idea of sanctuary in storytelling, it seems so modest in scale measured against the millions in search of food, peace and safety that it could easily and unhappily pass for a function of despair.