Plot: 7 (strong start maintains momentum through drab conclusion)
Characters: 10 (scandalous and highly entertaining)
Accuracy: 9 (overly modern language aside, it captures the period well)

I really enjoyed this book. It’s set in an interesting period of history (the last years when the Roman Empire could claim to span the Mediterranean as opposed to being merely a rump state occupying Anatolia and occasionally Greece) and features some fun characterizations. And since it’s set at the very beginning of this period (AD 609, towards the beginning of the last Roman-Persian War that ended in 628 and well before the Arab Conquest that started in 632) there’s plenty of material for future novels.

Aelric’s a great character. He’s a rarity in books of this kind: an adventurous scholar. Learning is his driving passion, although in most other respects he follows the ultra-manly attributes of a warrior. Wine, women, fighting, etc. He’s utterly without class. It’s an odd combination to be sure, and one that could easily seem forced and unwieldy. But this book manages to effectively make his lust for knowledge compatible with his lust for women and life in general. Better still, it’s able to make it seem odd that there should be a contradiction between these desires.

The entire novel is told in a first person flashback with Aelric back in the monastery of Jarrow at the improbably age of 95. Thinking back on all the ‘tales of a wild youth as recounted by an old man living in a monastery’ narratives (e.g. The Winter King, Justinian, and any number of gloomy medieval novels) it’s easy to see why most of them don’t work as well as this one does. Young Aelric is every bit as much a scholar as old Aelric so the contrast is not so severe. And while both are basically atheists they have strong Christian ties, so the shift from warrior-scholar to Christian scholar is basically just a matter of age. Not that the old Aelric bookends are entirely convincing. Like most such narratives it makes no attempt to imitate accurately the style of such contemporary narratives and instead uses the memoir as an excuse to tell the story how they want. Thank God. This book would be so boring if we removed all the sex and smut.

The story itself is strong enough to start with. The whole thing aims to tell a dirty and scandalous account of the various powerbrokers inhabiting the 7th century world. Despite what I expected from the blurb and the cover, the book is closer in style to a historical mystery than a boy’s own adventure novel. It’s still the Dark Ages, so it’s a bloody murder mystery with plenty of violence and danger, but much of the time is still spent in investigation rather than in seeking out and preparing for conflict. I thought that this was a disappointingly traditional format for such a nontraditional story. Fortunately, the murder doesn’t even happen until almost halfway through the book. The time up til then is filled with action and adventures.

I found the murder mystery the least interesting element of the book. I thought the perp was fairly obvious, though his motivations weren’t, and despite a strong start to this part of the story it grew to be quite a narrative drag by the end. In fact, if it wasn’t for the ending I’d probably have rated this book even higher. The last hundred or so pages really drag on and when the conclusion does arive it’s resolved so suddenly and then wraps everything up with implausible ease. It also seemed out of character for Aelric. I appreciated how Aelric remained within the bounds of contemporarily plausible morality for the period in question (a brief Libertarian digression on just laws and the inefficient implications of slavery aside) but to have a red-blooded Saxon forswear easy and consequence-free revenge is like having a fish forswear water. It was unmotivated and seemed to belong to a much nicer book.

The level of historical research here is superb. There were mistakes here and there (Procopius was Palestinian, not Syrian, and the Star of David wasn’t a universally Jewish symbol until the 19th century) but on the whole it managed to capture the feel of a poorly recorded and ill-remembered history very well. The few issues I had with it were more of style than substance. Specifically, the extremely colloquial dialogue. I realize that this is largely a matter of taste, but I find it somewhat distracting to see everyone talking like Freshmen enthusiastically trying out new swears for the first time. Particularly in elite contexts where you’d expect a much greater degree of formality. It could also be irritatingly vague or modern. Where a modern form of a word exists it will be used, even if it doesn’t line up exactly. Thus we get France for Francia (actually covering modern France as well as Belgium and much of the Netherlands and Germany), England (for the various Angle and Saxon kingdoms), and various other oddities. The criminal justice system seems a bit too modern as well, with postmortems and at least a theoretical obligation to investigate all crimes that I highly doubt existed. Ditto the papal grain dole. These are, as I said, more a matter of stylistic and clarity concerns than serious criticisms.

So I really enjoyed this book and look forward to further adventures of the warrior-scholar Aelric and his seemingly endless ability to say or do anything it takes to get what he wants. He keeps alluding to appalling (and hilariously scandalous) adventures that he’s been through and I want to see these enfold. Impersonating the Bishop of Laodicea to spy on the King of Persia sounds particularly fun. You know he’s going to get into so much trouble doing that. And of course, we haven’t even met Heraclius, the most important man of this age bar Mohammed (who I doubt we’ll meet), or for that matter Khusrau II, Shahrvaraz, Phocas, Omar, Khalid, Phocas, or any of the imperial commanders. I look forward to the next one. May these adventures continue to impress.

Published on Goodreads.com on the 26th November 2017

Tags: god, Historical Fiction, history, sex