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The Year Ahead

3 January 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Writing

Dear Friends and Gentle Readers, may I wish you all a very happy New Year!

This coming year, the jubilee year of 2025, should be interesting. My new, non-fiction book about the Venerable Bede will be published this year, probably in the late summer or early autumn, by Birlinn. It will be called Bede: the Invention of England and I am very excited about it: it tells the story of the man who, basically, invented a country that did not yet exist. Not only that, Bede established the BC/AD calendar that has become universal, wrote the key history of his time and became the model for the life of the scholar. So there’s lots to tell about a man who, basically, moved to a monastery when he was seven and stayed there for the rest of his life.

I am also writing a biography of the great 16th Italian military engineer, Gabriele Tadino, to be published by Osprey. Tadino’s was a life so ridiculously full of adventure that you wouldn’t believe it if you read it in a novel. I’m also excited to write about another key period in history, when the old world of the Middle Ages broke and a new age began. Also, being half Italian, it’s great to write about an Italian!

This biography will be a great sequel to my historical fiction novel, The War for the Heart of the World, which tells the story of Gabriele Tadino and the siege of Rhodes in 1522, when Suleiman the Magnificent and an army of 100,000 Ottomans attempted to batter down the walls of Rhodes, manned by the Knights Hospitaller, the last crusading order of military monks. It’s knights in armour versus cannons and guns – and it really happened!

The War for the Heart of the World will be published in the summer, so keep an eye open for it.

I have also written some short stories set in Anglo-Saxon Britain, looking at different aspects of the changes that took place during those centuries. I am just looking to see how best to publish these stories.

And, time permitting, I also hope to finish a new historical fiction novel telling the story of Benedict Biscop, The First Pilgrim.

So, a lot to look forward to this year! I hope 2025 brings you all every joy and blessing.

Book review: The Shroud by Ian Wilson

3 January 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
The Shroud by Ian Wilson

Is it? Is the long linen cloth held at Turin Cathedral the actual burial shroud that his grieving followers wrapped Jesus’s body with after his crucifixion?

That’s what this book sets out to answer and, basically, its answer is, “Yes, it is.”

For myself, I think the case is both weaker and stronger than the one Ian Wilson presents. It’s weaker historically: it’s very hard to get from the Shroud’s first verifiable appearance in the historical record, in 1355 in the unlikely setting of Lirey, a village in France, to the original shroud via its presumed preservation after the Resurrection, through centuries of Roman persecution, then to Constantinople as a holy relic and then a long hiatus after the Sack of Constantinople in 1203 before its eventual reappearance in France.

However, the case is stronger for the image itself. None of the proposed techniques for producing an image like the Shroud come close to the image itself. There were no artists at the time capable of producing an image of this nature. And no contemporary forger would have put the nails through the wrists, for all crucifixion scenes of the time assumed that Jesus had been nailed through the hands, not the wrists.

So the Shroud remains a mystery. If it is a forgery, then it’s forgery would be almost as miraculous as if the Shroud were, indeed, the burial cloth of Jesus. If it’s genuine, then… Everything changes.

Book review: The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God by Justin Brierley

3 January 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God by Justin Brierley

Matthew Arnold’s poem, Dover Beach, laments the long withdrawing roar of the Sea of Faith, the tide of belief slowly receding.

But the thing with tides is, they go out and then they come back in. And, less obviously, tides go in and out at different times in different places. In Britain, religious belief has been in decline for the last half century or so. The same is true of much of Europe. But elsewhere, notably in Africa and China, the opposite is the case.

Justin Brierley has been hosting a podcast where he brings together notable atheist and religious thinkers and has them talk, in a civil and constructive manner. And over the decade or so he has been doing this, he has seen, as have I, a distinct change. The millennarian stridency of the New Atheists has lessened to an appreciation of the human value of shared religious belief: no less an atheist than Richard Dawkins now accepts the cultural value of Christianity to the England that he loves.

Other thinkers, such as the historian Tom Holland, have highlighted how the entire foundations of even the most secular Western thought are built upon Christian foundations. The concern for the victim that underlies much modern thought comes entirely from the Christian view of the sacrificial value of the pure victim that is Christ himself.

Apart from Tom Holland, other intellectuals are coming round to the idea of the value of Christianity, such as Niall Ferguson. Outside intellectual circles, it’s interesting to note the increasing number of Premier League footballers who put faith at the centre of their life, privately and publicly, such as Bukayo Saka, as well as celebrity conversions such as Russell Brand.

All these suggest that we may have reached the turning of the tide. Combine this with the fact that atheist and agnostic couples have significantly fewer children than religious couples, and it suggests that the 21st century will see not the death of religion but its rebirth – even in the supposedly secular West.

Book review: Penitent by Dan Abnett

31 December 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
Penitent by Dan Abnett

I think, in this book, Dan Abnett may have invented a new genre: medieval baroque. Penitent combines the medieval, military SF tropes of 40k fiction with a gorgeous, lush baroque sensibility, rather as if Edgar Allen Poe took to writing 40k after a particularly stiff dose of laudanum.

Book review: Lords of the Horizons by Jason Goodwin

31 December 2024
Edoardo
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Lords of the Horizons by Jason Goodwin

It’s interesting looking at the spread of reviews about this book online. Most are positive – and mine will be too – but there are two significant subsets who loathe it. First, the extreme Turkophiles, for whom any history of the Ottomans that does not paint their empire as an unalloyed good and a general beacon of good governance, and secondly, the Armenian apologists, who lament Goodwin’s skating over the Armenian genocide. Of the two, the Armenians have the greater reason to be annoyed; the Turkophiles will never be satisfied.

For myself, I found it the most thoroughly enjoyable one-volume history of the Ottoman Empire that I have read, and I highly recommend it.

Book review: Dragon’s Blood & Willow Bark by Toni Mount

31 December 2024
Edoardo
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Dragon’s Blood & Willow Bark by Toni Mount

An interesting compendium of the various treatments and cures provided by medieval doctors. As it turns out, they were much better in some areas, in particular the treatment of battlefield injuries, than you might expect: men survived some truly horrific injuries and lived to fight another day. However, there was a little too much of the old and tired trope of the Church banning research. Nevertheless, a good research book for the period.

Book review: Brendan by Frederick Buechner

26 December 2024
Edoardo
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Brendan by Frederick Buechner

What to make of those tales of early medieval saints who stood neck deep in freezing water for hours at a time, or who put to sea in tiny coracles without oars, trusting to God to take them where He would, be that to a new land or a water grave? They are men so very far from modern sympathies and sensibilities that it’s almost impossible to believe that they did such things – but they did.

Bringing them to life is difficult. Frederick Buechner, however, managed this feat brilliantly in his novel, Godric. He attempts it again in Brendan, a story about the Irish saint famous for setting forth in one of those little boats, to not quite the same effect. Where Godric is narrated by the saint himself, and credibly told in such wise, Brendan is told by a companion and friend, who stands in some ways for the reader: unsure but interested. However, in such matters, lack of certainty is ultimately fatal: the water will freeze the blood, the waves close over the boat, the narrative founder on ‘maybe’.

The book does, however, succeed in portraying well the sheer strangeness of 6th century Ireland and how very far it’s culture was from ours today. So read Brendan for its lyrical sensibility and its window into a very strange world.

Book review: The Dragon Griaule by Lucius Shepard

26 December 2024
Edoardo
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The Dragon Griaule by Lucius Shepard

The collection of stories about the dragon, Griaule, gathered in this volume contain one of the most extraordinary ideas in fantasy fiction: a dragon so huge that it forms the landscape: a mouth that opens into a vast cavern, a back that forms a range of hills, claws like towers. The dragon in question is petrified, an evolving ecosystem of life living on and in its remains. But although it does not move, it still, apparently, lives in some geological way, its influence moulding and shaping the lives of those who inhabit the nearby settlements and further afield.

As I said, it’s one of the most fascinating ideas ever put on page. But as to whether you will like it, that depends a lot on what you think of magical realism. As written, the book draws a lot from that genre, even to its setting in an invented but clearly South or Central American country. If you love magical realism then you’ll adore The Dragon Griaule. If you hate the genre, then steer clear of this novel. For myself, I am relatively indifferent to magical realism, in particular a realism that generally concentrates on the degraded and the decadent, so that reduced my appreciation for the book. A brilliant concept written in a style that I am not particularly sympathetic towards.

Book review: Blind Voices by Tom Reamy

26 December 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
Blind Voices by Tom Reamy

In between other books, at the moment I am re-reading some of the stories I read when I was young. Seeing Blind Voices on the shelf at my parents’ house, I remembered being enchanted by an atmosphere of fairground mysticism when I read it and, taking it from the bookshelf, I read the blurb and then the back cover – and remembered again that this was Tom Reamy’s only book and that he had died before Blind Voices was published. This aura of tragedy overlay my memory of the book: all I could remember was a halo of heat and brassy fairground music; I had no recollection of the story itself, other than that I had enjoyed it.

So I brought Blind Voices home and set to reading it again. And, yes, there was a travelling show, although it was an out-and-out freak show rather than the travelling fair with outlandish exhibits that I vaguely recalled, and yes, the story is suffused with the heat and dust of summer on the flat grain plains of the American heartlands. But is it a good story?

Well, yes, but when I first read it – checking the copyright date that was 46 years ago! – I had not yet read Ray Bradbury. The story is basically Something Wicked This Way Comes with more sex (I’m rather surprised that the teenage me that read the story didn’t remember this at all) and children who you start off thinking are protagonists but end up being merely observers. Now, it’s clear that it’s a good story rather than a great story, one that wears its influences so clearly that it’s almost a homage to Bradbury.

However, it does still retain its air of quiet tragedy for I think it’s clear that Reamy would have gone on to be a major writer in his own right if he had not died so young. He had talent and he was on his way towards finding his own voice but he had not got there yet with this book.

A note about the cover: it’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen, and bears no relation to anything in the book. Please don‘t judge this book by its cover!