"John the Pupil" by David Flusfeder

 This novel purports to be a fragmentary chronicle, assembled from scraps of parchment, recording the journey taken by the eponymous John, a pupil of the Franciscan monk Roger Bacon, with two other young monks Andrew and Bernard, to carry Bacon's Great Work to Pope Clement IV.

It's a historical novel. Bacon (c 1219 - c 1292), a proto-scientist who studied, amongst many other things, lenses and gunpowder, really did send his Opus Maior to Clement in either 1267 or 1268. Other characters are also historical, including nobleman Cavalcante de Cavalcanti and his son Guido who was a part-time poet and a friend of Dante Aligheri. Other characters are fictional. 

The book attempts to add verisimilitude with a 'Note on the Text' at the start, describing how the chronicle was discovered, reassembled and translated, and endnotes which, inter alia, cast doubt on some aspects of the text (is it a contemporary diary or was it written later, or worse ...). For example, on p52 (St Hubert's Day) John states "In such a way did we affect our first escape from Simeon the Palmer"; had this been written at the time he would not have known it would be the first escape. 

The main text starts with an ellipsis as though the text is incomplete; this is repeated at times. Many of the sections give a potted biography of the saint on whose days they were written, a conceit I found a little wearisome as it was repeatedly repeated.

It is structured as a Hero's Journey. John, who is clever, travels with Andrew who is beautiful and Bernard who is strong. They encounter temptations (alcohol, women, a garden paradise) and dangers. They are befriended and betrayed. Bandits try to steal their possessions, including the book. Like all good heroes on their journey, they have to use their gifts in order to overcome these trials. 

There is a huge amount of historical research which makes it interesting for a student of that period. As the endnotes point out: "All historical novels are failures or, at best, metaphors, dressing up the present day in anachronistic disguise." (p 212)

It is a triumph of re-creation. But, in the end, it stands and falls as a novel on whether you empathise with John and his mates and you like the buddy-journey sort of tale. 

Selected quotes:

• "Brother Bernard ... is always suspicious, he would interrogate the motives on an angel" (St Hubert's Day, p 43)
• "Beauty speaks to beauty." (St Edgar's Day, p 62)
• "The Devil tempts only the very good and the very bad." (St Ephrem's Day, p 70)
• "They had a kind of priest among them, a man with a wildness about him, as if he had stared for too long into a consuming fire." (St Silverius's Day, p 79)
• "To go to Rome, much labour, little profit." (St Bartholomew's Day, p 85)
• "Lines rounden, loop, droop, curve." (St John the Baptist's Day, p 88)
• "You are the seal of the image of God, full of wisdom and perefect in beauty." (St Swithin's Day, p 96)
• "Hunger is too hard a stepmother to learning." (St Swithin's Day, p 97)
• "We walked towards the mountains and it was as if they refused us. They grew no larger, although it appeared to me that we were getting smaller." (St Thomas of Canterbury's Day, p 100)
• "Pope Clement, in a larger voice than I would have thought his body could contain, invited me to stand." (St Tiburtius's Day, p 188)
• "My master has enumerated some of the accidents [Flusfeder uses words in their mediaeval meaning] of old age, grey hair and pallor and wrinkled skin and excess mucus and stinking stool, the sickly bleariness of eyes, low blood and low spirits, crabbiness and absent-mindedness, and Pope Clement seems to exhibit them all." (St Tiburtius's Day, p 196)
• "Pope Clement's voice, profound and wise, stepping out the words like a traveller choosing where to place the stones to make a path over the river." (St Tiburtius's Day, p 197)

Synopsis (spoiler alerts)

John and his companions beautiful Andrew and strong Bernard are sent by Roger Bacon to walk from Oxford to Viterbus in Italy carrying Bacon's book to the Pope. On the way they are waylaid by a 'pilgrim for hire' whose attempt to steal the book is confounded, firstly by John demonstrating a burning glass and secondly by the gunpowder in a decoy box exploding. Other temptations include Bernard getting drunk in Paris and Andrew being bedded by a serving wench. John is tempted by Father Gabriel, a wise priest who has a paradisaical garden and uses herbs to help the sick; he urges John to stay. The trio fall out among themselves: John is upset when Andrew and Bernard reveal they have read his 'diary'; they are upset he hasn't been upfront about their task, Bernard steals ink and parchment in order to do drawings of mythical beasts. Finally they become the guests of a Guelph nobleman who sets John up as a healer and Bernard as a jeweller. Only John and Andrew leave. They then encounter Daniel, another friar from their monastery, who has been sent by Bacon with a smaller version of the Great Work; Daniel is martyred by bandits which enables John to escape. Finally, all alone, he comes to Rome and meets the Pope. The burning lens demonstration fails to work but Clement is delighted when he discovers the lens can be used to correct his failing eyesight and help him to read again. Finally, John decides not to hand the book over.

David Flusfeder has also written Something Might Fall

June 2026; 220 pages
First published by Fourth Estate in 2014
My paperback edition was issued in 2015

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Lily" by Rose Tremain

Tremendous verisimilitude but a dearth of complex characters in this novel about Victorian England.

 Foundling Lily, saved from wolves as a newborn by a policeman, is raised by the Coram foundation. Following an idyllic six years raised on a farm in the countryside, she is returned to the strictures and abuses of the orphanage. As a young adult becomes a wig-maker (hair is a theme that runs through the novel). But she has murdered someone and when she re-encounters the policeman who saved her, now a detective, she realises that her discovery is inevitable. 

Following the first line hook "She dreams of her death", we are told that the eponymous protagonist-narrator has murdered someone but it is not until we are two-thirds of the way through the book that we finally witness it happening. I felt that this was over-prolonged, perhaps because there is little drama elsewhere in this predictable story about hardship and cruelty in a Victorian orphanage.

This is the sort of historical novel in which the past is viewed through the eyes of the present. It therefore presented easy targets and was inevitably condemned. Opposing arguments (such as the idea that life inside the orphanage, for all its traumas, is better than the life of an orphan on the streets of London) are weakly made. I prefer novels which challenge contemporary thinking and make me think, such as the robust defence of zoos mounted in Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

The story is thoroughly grounded in the period; the author's research creates enormous verisimilitude. But the characters are either goody-goodies (the rustics) or baddies (of course, the figures of authority who are either unspeakably wicked or complacently ineffective). This undermines the realism and turns this bildungsroman into a fairy tale.

Selected quotes:

• "Swaithey was a place where life more more slowly than time." (Rookery Farm)
• "Age kills us piece by piece." (The Brass Crucifix)
• "The long sigh of someone whose habit it was to sound a lamentation on her daily quota of existence." (The Brass Crucifix)

I have loved some Rose Tremain novels (The Road Home, Absolutely and Forever, The Gustav Sonata) but this is one of the ones which was merely okay.

November 2025; 274 pages

First published by Chatto & Windus in 2021

My Penguin Vintage paperback was issued in 2022

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Rose Tremain novels:

• Sadler's Birthday (1976)
• Letter to Sister Benedicta (1978)
• The Cupboard (1981)
• Journey to the Volcano (1985)
• The Swimming Pool Season (1985)
• Restoration (1989)
• 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year
• Shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize
• Sacred Country (1992)
• Winner of the 1992 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
• Winner of the 1994 Prix Femina Etranger
• The Way I Found Her (1997)
• Music and Silence (1999)
• Winner of the 1999 Whitbread Award
• The Colour (2003)
• The Road Home (2008)
• Trespass (2010)
• Merivel: A Man of His Time (2012)
• Shortlisted for the 2012 Wellcome Book Prize
• Shortlisted for the 2013 Walter Scott prize
• The Gustav Sonata (2016)
• Winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award
• Shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Book Awards
• Longlisted for the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for fiction
• Winner of the 2017 Ribalow Prize
• Islands of Mercy (2020)
• Lily: A Tale of Revenge (2021)
• Absolutely & Forever (2023)
• Shortlisted for the 2024 Walter Scott Prize

"Footsteps in the Dew" by Marsali Taylor

 

A historical murder mystery set in an exciting period of Viking history.

1150. Shetland. Rannveig, the eldest daughter, has taken the place of her dead mother helping her father run their small farm with sidelines in fishing and pottery. A stranger is found dead in a nearby stone circle. Clues include a footprint and a bead from a broken necklace. Whodunnit? Members of the old paganism, still celebrating Thor even though the country is supposedly pagan? Or was the stranger a spy for one of the three kings who rule Norway in a supposedly harmonious triumvirate? And why was silver stolen from father's hiding place and then put back? 

Rannveig's investigation progresses against a background of Vikings and crusaders. The setting is perfect and includes such archaic processes of justice as the ordeal by bier-right - when the dead man's body is wrapped in white cloth and laid in the church and each man from the locality must in turn place his hand on the body and swear his innocence and the body is watched to see whether it will bleed indicating guilt - and the steeple run in which a man and his accuser must race for the steeple and the first one to touch it is innocent and the loser is hanged but the kinsfolk and friends of either man can impede either runner. 

It's a story which is full of local colour and it also contains the Marsali Taylor trademark pitch-perfect descriptions:

• "The grassy hill sparkled with morning dew ... as if an angel had sprinkled curled shavings of silver over the green blades." (Ch 1)
• "The amber sun shone on the shorn field, strengthening the hay, sealing the goodness in." (Ch 4) 'Shone on the shorn', what wonderful assonance!
• "The turning point between summer and winter was haustblót, the great harvest feast, held three weeks after the autumn equinox, as the dark ate away at the daylight, and the hills turned from their royal purple to rusted pink. On the lower ground, the marsh grass darkened to olive, and the bog asphodel made patches of burnt orange among the bleaching grasses. The wild geese creaked overhead, dark wings spread against the pale sky." (Ch 4) Not only a description from which a painter could create a painting, but also the dark eating the daylight and the geese creaking overhead. Wow!
• "Rannveig was reminded of the way he had walked up the hill after they had told him Midder was dead, as if his feet were too heavy to life." (Ch 9)

I thoroughly enjoyed this murder mystery which reminded me of childhood favourites such as The Woolpack by Cynthia Harnett and the Henry Treece series of Viking books including Viking's Dawn, The Road to Miklagard, and Viking's Sunset. 

Marsali Taylor is also the author of the Shetland Sailing Mysteries, a series of murder mysteries starring intrepid sailor and amateur investigator Cass Lynch. The series so far is:

• Death on a Shetland Longship
• The Trowie Mound Murders (Buried in a Shetland Tomb)
• A Handful of Ash (The Shetland Night Killings)
• The Body in the Bracken (Grave of a Shetland Sailor)
• Ghosts of the Vikings (The Shetland Poisonings)
• Death in Shetland Waters
• Death on a Shetland Isle
• Death from a Shetland Cliff
• The Shetland Sea Murders
• A Shetland Winter Mystery
• Death in a Shetland Lane
• Death at a Shetland Festival

May 2025, 135 pages

This novel was originally written in 2015, serialised in the magazine Shetland Life.

My paperback edition was issued in 2020

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"1541: The Cataclysm" by Robert William Jones

This book is the first in the Micklegate series. It is an entertainingly irreverent romp blend of at least three genres: historical, thriller and fantasy. The tone is set right from the start with an execution described by a narrator with a very dark sense of humour. 

'Lord' Silas, a village idiot, Robert, Lord Mayor of York, two monks chucked out of the monasteries following the Dissolution, washerwomen ex-nun Elspeth and her crippled friend Wynnfrith, farmer Richard Shakespeare (grandfather of the playwright), Edward Fawkes (father of Guy) and assorted others form an impromptu group (the Agents of the Word) led by a talking mouse with a secret (not just that he talks) and an attitude problem. Their purpose is to save Tudor England from a Cataclysm. 

There were moments when the pacing was spot on (the group coheres at exactly the 33% mark, there is a revelation worthy of W S Gilbert as the 50% mark) but there were other moments when the plot seemed to suddenly speed up. Some elements of the quest such as the discovery of the books and the recovery of Abigail seemed rather too easy. I wasn't sure how the Lizzie sub-plot fitted in but I appreciated that not everyone lived happily ever after. Nor am I sure that I fully understood all the clues in the convoluted plot but it was certainly an ingenious climax. There was even a twist in the mouse's tale. 

Selected quotes:

• "Annie was a middle-aged horse with the strength, dedication and attitude of a foal." (Ch 1)
• "Bacteria in all its glorious forms was here and having an all-night party, but simultaneously, completely absent in the imagination of the sixteenth-century public." (Ch 2)
• "He was a crap juggler spending most of the morning chasing his balls around the market, if you’ll forgive the expression." (Ch 5) 
• "We will win because we are good" (Ch 15) A character who understands the rules of fiction!
• "She’d find a better catch in the river!" (Ch 16)
•  "The King has planted a new Bishop there. More a pawn than a Bishop. " (Ch 17)
• "I didn't have an opinion about this. Strange, you think. Is the mouse unwell?" (Ch 18)
• "'What an unfortunate mismatch of miscreants and misfits!’ He annoyingly alliterated." (Ch 23)

An entertaining slice of horrible history with lots of humour. June 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Nothing Left to Fear from Hell" by Alan Warner

Bonnie Prince Charlie has escaped the killing grounds of the Battle of Culloden, fled across mainland Scotland, and is now hiding among the Hebridean islands, hungry, dirty and frequently sodden, with a few loyal companions, ever alert for a hint of a redcoated soldier.

This short novel describes, in visceral detail, his tribulations.  In the first chapter, we watch as he vomits, defecates and urinates. Warner deploys remarkable powers of description as we endure, with the Prince, the infamous West Highland midges, we tramp with him across then landscape, losing our shoes in sucking bogs. To start off with I wondered if, perhaps, the descriptions had gone overboard, foregrounding the language to the extent that the narrative was disrupted.  for example, the end of the second paragraph states that "a blunt phalanx of fumes manouevred from the outcrops of the low island snuffing its colours down to a bulk." The third paragraph then begins: "A shore emerged from the briny effluvium ..." Words such as 'phalanx' and 'effluvium' seemed to me to shout for attention, as if the author was showing off. But then I thought that this sort of language would be routine if this was poetry. That's when I realised that this is wildly, wonderfully, impressively poetic prose. And, once we have reached the second chapter, the balance between description and dialogue, between observation and action, somewhat settles down, leaving the reader with a story that is nevertheless rendered in language so lyrical as to become a thing of beauty in itself.

Then we learn about the characters, focusing on that of the Young Pretender. He is portrayed as "a chancer who brought havoc" as the author himself says in an afterword. He's a chameleon of a man, stoic and terrified, charming and petulant, selfish and repeatedly self-deluding as he describes the latest roofless byre as a palace and assures his followers that he will return with a French army, at times courageous and at others, such as when he is hysterically frightened of being captured and hanged, drawn and quartered, a frightened rabbit. 

This is a remarkable picture of a human being in all his moods and  aspects and it combines with the rapturously expressive and passionate descriptions of the landscape, a character in its own right, to make an outstanding work of literature.

Selected quotes:

• "Rising and dipping oars sounding like the slap of linen shirts on riverside stones." (Ch 1) What a metaphor! And so in period!
• "A terrible frown cracked along the brow, showing some tender pink in a single serration, like the glistening raw streak against the charcoal of barbecued mutton, skewered fresh and smoking from fire." (Ch 2)
• "The hems of her sacking shroud were a sodden mash that dragged over heather clumps, so the creature's means of phantom locomotion beneath were invisibled." (Ch 2) I loved this sentence from the alliteration at the start of the sentence to the anthimeria of 'invisibled' at the end.
• "Herring gulls passed over low, curiously silent like possible informers." (Ch 5)
• "The way to have peace on earth: blindness for all. For sightless men could make no war. ... The cannon? Are you certain our cannon face them, and not us?"  (Ch 6)
• "The magnitude of these cliffs, no so close and huge above them, was a nauseating thing, putting far away the comforting notions that among houses, formed fields, tracks and hedgeways, as we walk to church, we move in a world God fitted for us with snug accommodation, adapted to the size and shape of humankind and rightly appointed." (Ch 8)
• "It walked like an adrift coo with a deid stillborn hanging out the hole in its arse." (Ch 9)
• "The mountainsides were reflected in those waters below, faithful and absolute, so every dimple and dapple of the braes became imitated and inverted on the dark water surface - it was as if the world was unsure which way up it actually stood, for the steady and gorgeous birdsong was unaffected by inversion, the sound had no top and no bottom." (Ch 11)

May 2024; 136 pages

 Warner also wrote Morvern Callar.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God