This is an early Koontz novel, published in 1984 originally under a pseudonym as Koontz, like Stephen King, was writing books at too fast a pace for his publisher’s marketing strategy. It shows Koontz’s developing interest in mashing up genres, in this case the police detective novel and the supernatural thriller, with a leaven of romance via the lead detectives. It doesn’t really stand out among Koontz’s many many novels but for us Koontz completists it’s interesting in showing his growing interest in orthodox religion which later culminated in him becoming a Catholic.
There are some books that define their subject. This is one of them. Christopher Duffy’s magisterial study of the first century and a half of siege warfare in the Gunpowder Age is superb not merely for its breadth and depth of scholarship, for its lucid style that makes this abstruse area of warfare accessible to everyone but also for the dry wit that sparkles through the lines. It’s seldom that such a technical book can also be a joy to read but this is one of those rare exceptions.
The trouble with books written in the first person and entirely from the viewpoint of the narrator is that you have to like the narrator, or at least enjoy spending time in his company, for the book to work. Which is sad because Alien Clay, which is otherwise an excellent book with a brilliant narrative twist, has a narrator whom I cordially disliked. There’s no particular reason for the dislike; it’s the literary equivalent of that person who you just don’t click with.
The narrative twist, or technique (which I fully intend to nick!) was this: the hero and a group of comrades find themselves marooned far from base on a planet which the previous two thirds of the book has established as unremittingly hostile and dangerous. But with no hope of rescue, they decide to try to walk back to camp through the alien jungle, a journey which they estimate will take them five days. Everything in the book so far has set this up as virtual suicide and surely the crux of the story. Adrian Tchaikovsky sets his characters off, walking into the jungle, into danger and doom and… The very next chapter is them arriving safely at camp, five days later, with everyone having successfully survived the walk.
It really wasn’t what I expected. The story then splits. Part of the narrative continues forward, telling what happens after they return to camp, while part of the narrative spirals back to their trek through the jungle. And it turns out that what they do in the camp is the result of what happened to them in the jungle. It’s a very clever narrative trick and, as I said, one I fully intend to use myself.
So, despite a narrator I don’t particularly like, the book is so well written that it deserves a four-star rating.
There’s a singular problem with books about 1066: the bad guys win.
Now, that’s not to say I hate the Normans. One look at Mont-St-Michel should be enough to reveal that they were capable of marvels, and a second look at the extraordinary kingdom they created in Sicily will confirm that. But, in England, they were butchers. It’s possible that William didn’t expect as much resistance as he received. After all, the English had accepted another foreign king, Cnut, with fairly good grace. But William had to pay off the men who had backed him in his venture, and that meant basically stealing the country and doling it out to his followers. Cue twenty years of warfare and near genocide.
Which does, unfortunately, make books set in the aftermath of the Conquest generally depressing. We all know how it’s going to end and it’s not good. However, I’m pleased to say that GK Holloways’ excellent novel isn’t all gloom and dispossession. It does follow the lives of a wide range of characters cut loose by the Conquest, highlighting the difficult choices they have to make, but the author chooses stories that allow for at least a modicum of hope.
If you are looking for a novel exploring the repercussions of the Conquest but one that won’t leave you feeling depressed for a month afterwards, In the Shadows of Castles is an excellent choice.
A short (60-odd pages) history of the Gunpowder plot. A good place to start if you want to learn more than the Wikipedia entry but you’re not sure if you want to embark upon a full-on history of the conspiracy and its aftermath.
My new book! I’m delighted to say that The Man Who Stopped the Sultan is out on 29 January 2026, published by Osprey Books.
Heres’s the blurb:
An extraordinary account of how one man defied the most powerful ruler of his age and in doing so changed the course of European history.
Throughout the 16th century, wars raged across Europe as kings and republics jostled for wealth and power. Yet one man exceeded all these medieval princes of Christendom: Suleiman the Magnificent. As ruler of the Ottoman Empire, he governed 25 million people from Constantinople, his realm stretching from Persia to the Atlantic Ocean. Turning his gaze to Europe, Suleiman attacked Rhodes, the island fortress of the Knights Hospitaller but was opposed by Gabriele Tadino – an Italian who had risen through the ranks thanks to his genius as a military engineer.
This is a fascinating history of crusading knights and gunpowder, of spies and tunnels, and of a crossroads in history when the medieval age gave way to the Renaissance. Delving deep into Italian source material, Edoardo Albert weaves together the story of an ordinary man alive in an extraordinary time and performing extraordinary feats of military genius. Through the lens of his life we discover how military tactics and fortifications rapidly changed thanks to the discovery of gunpowder, and how Europe, divided by power-hungry rulers and religion, almost fell to one of the greatest rulers the world has ever seen, but was prevented by a humble engineer.
I’m very excited about this book and I hope you will be too!
The Shadow of the Torturer, the first novel in the four-book cycle that makes up the Book of the New Sun, came out in 1980. I tried to read it not long afterwards – and got stuck. This was a time when I could read almost anything but The Shadow of the Torturer defeated me.
However, it left a shadow mark: the faint wish to return to it some day. Now, 45 years later, I have returned to it and I discovered that it left more of a mark upon me than I had realised. For the hero of the novel, the apprentice in the guild of torturers on an ancient earth orbiting a dying sun, is named Severian – and the middle name of my youngest son is Severian. I had no conscious recollection whatsoever that this was the case, yet my youngest son is named Isaac Severian Albert. Clearly, the book had had a greater impact on me than I realised.
Reading it now, I begin to see why. But that understanding is still only partial; this is a rich, dense, thickly layered book, one that will take many readings to truly appreciate (and I might need to look up some other people’s critiques to pick up on all the allusions). It’s writing that bears the weight of the ancient earth it depicts. Time itself has become thick and dense, while everything else grows more insubstantial, drifting into versions of itself layered into the past.
Well, he really really hated them. The them in question being the Emperor Justinian and his wife, the Empress Theodora, rulers of the Byzantine Empire in the 6th century, with left over bile poured out upon the emperor’s chief general, Belisarius. The writer, Procopius, was a high-ranking Byzantine civil servant who worked first with Belisarius and then with the Emperor and his wife. He knew the people he wrote about and, apparently, came to loathe them with an overweening passion.
I don’t think there’s been a literary revenge more vicious than the history that Procopius wrote knowing that it would only be published after his death. It had to be published after he died as seeing it into publication personally would have ensured a very short and painful period before he did die.
Historically, Justinian is seen as the man who restored the Roman empire to something like its former glory and Belisarius was the general who accomplished this reconquest at the emperor’s behest. But according to Procopius, both men were hen-pecked cowards, completely dominated by their sex-obsessed wives, who cuckolded emperor and general with impunity and competed in contests to see who could sleep with more men.
If it reads like some sort of fever dream, particularly when compared with the actual accomplishments of Justinian and Theodora, then that’s because it must be: no one as incompetent as the Justinian portrayed in the Secret History could have done what the historical Justinian did. But then the question arises as to why Procopius hated them so. And the answer is that we don’t know. Scholars have proposed various answers but none are completely convincing.
Given the viciousness with which Procopius treats Theodora, and Belisarius’s wife Antonina, he seems to have despised women. But then, he claims Justinian was possessed by demons.
Really, he just hated them. If nothing else, this illustrates the maxim, never get too close to your heroes. Perhaps the best explanation is that Procopius entered their service as one dazzled and entranced, and left it as one disillusioned and filled with bile – a bile he poured into his Secret History. There really is nothing else like it.
Writing a light, easy-to-read book is as difficult as baking a light, airy cake. Both must seem effortless in the consumption but require meticulous preparation and execution to produce the required sensation, akin to riding upon a souffle under a sparkling spring sky.
Fergus Butler-Gallie succeeds in producing the required impression with the parade of eccentrics, lunatics and holy fools that march across the pages. It’s a light read, in the best sense of the word, and limited to Church of England clergy, but that produces a cast broad enough for any such compendium.
Perhaps the saddest part of the decline of the Anglican Church in England is that there is no obvious home for men like this any more. While this might come as a relief for their parishioners, many (but certainly not all) of these priests were committed to the welfare of their parishioners – whether those parishioners wanted their ministrations or not.
Nowadays, no doubt, they would all be stuck with some sort of psychological label. As it is, they remain as a glorious parade of the eccentricity for which the English were once famous for – and hopefully will be again.
The name is unusual: Bijan Omrani. If we can judge by it, then Bijan Omrani has the same sort of complex relationship to England and Englishness as I do. In my case, my Christian name betrays a foreign source (my mother is Italian) but my surname, while ostensibly English, conceals an even more exotic home: Sri Lanka. My father is Sri Lankan – half Sinhala and half Tamil – but at some point in the past an ancestor changed his name to Albert, possibly in honour of Prince Albert. Unfortunately, we don’t know for sure when this happened as my grandparents, one Sinhala and one Tamil, were a love match who married in the teeth of parental opposition and my father never met his own grandparents. So I don’t know when or why our name was changed.
But like Mr Omrani, I was born in England and I have lived all my life here. My roots lie draped over half the world but my growth is here, in this place and this city: London. So like Mr Omrani, at some level I am concerned with, and am trying to answer, the question of what is it to be English? In my case, I have also written a book to answer this question: Bede: the Man Who Invented England (due out next spring from Birlinn). It’s interesting to compare our answers, as given in our two books.
From various passages in Mr Omrani’s book, it’s clear that at least one set of his grandparents were what I might call properly English. Indeed, they appear to have represented something of a survival from Britain’s Imperial heyday during the reign of Queen Victoria: morning tea, choral evensong, self discipline expected and inculcated, and a deep but mostly unspoken patriotism.
In my case, there were no relatives in this country. In fact, all my childhood friends were the children of immigrants – it was only when I went to university that I became friends with actual English people. My mother, however, had distinct ideas as to what ‘Englishness’ was. I remember her, when I was about six, pulling me up about how I was speaking and telling me to talk like the BBC. Remember, this was the 1960s, when BBC presenters all spoke in proper RP. In terms of behaviour, she told me to behave like an English gentleman. Although I was young, I did not have to ask her what she meant by that. I was a reader, utterly formed by books, and the idea of the English gentleman had been formed in me by reading books like The Wind in the Willows and the Famous Five. I knew what she meant from what I had read.
For Mr Omrani, a key part of being English was the Church of England. Its rituals, its company, its words and its physical presence in town and school and through the passages of his growing life.
It was different for me. My parents were Catholic so I was too. This was, in the 1960s and ’70s, still the religion of outsiders and immigrants: Irish, Italians, Poles mostly at the schools I went to. Loyalties were mixed but still deep: my best friend, Paul Fitzpatrick, ran the cadet force during the worst times for IRA attacks in London when he, as a 16 year old, had the keys to the arsenal in the school – he literally had access to enough guns and ammunition to start a small-scale insurrection! (Times were a little different!) But despite his thoroughly Irish Catholic ancestry, Paul never even thought of sneaking any Lee Enfield rifles to the IRA. We weren’t English, but we were loyal.
Then, in 1998, I married an Englishwoman. My father-in-law, as my mother approvingly remarked, was a proper English gentleman. And he was. Oxbridge. High-flying civil servant and (we finally found out), he had even been a member of MI5 in the 1960s (when asked whether he had had anything to do with Philby, Burgess and Maclean, David answered, ‘Not directly.’) In fact, the stuff David was involved with was so secret that, after his death, when his daughters tried to find out about his service with MI5, they discovered that his career there was all covered under the 100-years rule, which only applies to the most sensitive of state secrets.
Together, we have three children, three sons. And watching them grow up, it was clear that they all regarded themselves as English. But then, what did that make me? In part, I wrote my book to answer that question.
Recently, some people have taken to claiming that being English is genetic: take a DNA test and if it comes up that your ancestry is, say, 90 per cent British with maybe 10 per cent Irish layered on top, then you qualify as English. It’s a view of national identity that lies in blood and, obviously, that would then exclude me – as it would exclude Rishi Sunak, Ian Wright or Frank Bruno. Now, these are three men I do regard as English. They see themselves as English. Sunak was prime minister. Wright played football for England, Bruno came close to winning the world heavyweight boxing title for England. Are they wrong?
I don’t think so. My mother-in-law was born in South Africa to English parents who emigrated there. She grew up under apartheid, which was in effect a sort of whiteness purity test: you might look paler than Snow White but if a great-grandparent was African, then you were put into the ‘mixed-race’ designation. This is clearly nonsense. There was no point at which the ‘taint’ of black blood could be washed away. The same is true in the opposite direction: how many generations born on this island are necessary to produce an Englishman? Following this logic, you’d have had to come over in the original boats with Hengist and Horsa to qualify as English. By this view, even an admixture of Norman blood would disqualify the bearer as properly Anglo-Saxon.
When I wrote my book on Bede, I realised that it was Bede who was, in part, the man who first developed the idea of England. Before Bede, there weren’t any Englishmen. There were Kentish men and men of Suffolk, Northumbrians and Mercians, the West Saxons, the South Saxons, the East Saxons and the Middle Saxons. Identity was local and personal. It was Bede who invented the English and he did this by contrasting them against the other people living in Britain, the Britons, the Picts and the Scots (who were actually from Ireland). What distinguished these different peoples were their languages:
“At the present time, there are in the island of Britain five languages, and four nations: the languages of the English, the Britons, the Scots, and the Picts, each having its own tongue; and the fifth is the Latin tongue, which is used in the service of religion.”
By defining the English in opposition to the Britons (who became the Welsh) and the Picts and Scots, Bede contributed to the long history of conflict between the later kingdoms. In his time, warfare was just as common between the Anglo-Saxon kings as it was against the Britons, the Picts and the Scots, but by creating an idea of a single English polity, Bede provided the impetus to turn its expansion outwards, against the Britons and the Scots.
Indeed, today’s blood nationalists have taken this idea and run with it, equating nationality and identity with genetic, and racial, inheritance, while also producing an idealised view of an Anglo-Saxon idyll destroyed by the Norman conquest.
However, while Bede might be guilty of defining the English against the Briton and the Scots, he had another basis of identity that superseded blood: Christianity. For Bede, religion was much much more important than race. The Britons were condemned not for their nationality but for their stubborn clinging to heresy. The man whom Bede admires most wholeheartedly in the whole history was the Irishman, Aidan.
For Bede, religion was the core of identity and, as a Christian, that identity transcended any local allegiances or ties of blood. When Benedict Biscop, the founder of Bede’s monastery, was dying he expressly forbade his monks to choose any of his own relatives as his successor.
Some of the more fervent of present-day English nationalists seem to have understood this, for they have forsaken Christianity for a full-throated embrace of a reinvented Anglo-Saxon paganism.
Mr Omrani clearly understands Bede’s unique role in the definition of England, and his equally unique role in opening England up to the world as England became Christian. Paganism is local and particular, tied to roots and unable to escape them. The genius of Christianity is that it is both local and universal, tied to roots and open to heaven, a religion of a people and the religion of the world. Mr Omrani’s book makes that very clear and I hope mine will too.
