TV historian Neil Oliver cannot be accused of lacking ambition with this, his fiction debut. Stretching from the wilds of 15th-century Scotland through Turkey and Spain to the glitter of the Emperor’s court in Constantinople, he has mixed myth and legend with historical fact to produce a well-written historical romance that may, in the end, ask us to suspend just a little too much disbelief.
Those who are expecting a light, easy read will be in for a surprise. Oliver has structured his novel cleverly, opening with a prologue which will return, word for word towards the end. In subsequent chapters, he alternates between points of view to give a sense of a choppy, restless narrative, one in harmony with the short, brutal nature of life at this time. We meet his hero, John Grant, as a boy, saved from death by the Moor, Badr Khassan, who has arrived in Scotland charged by his erstwhile friend, Patrick Grant, John’s father, to look out for his family. He couldn’t have come at a better time: the enemy of the Grants, Sir Robert Jardine, has had enough of playing softly with James’s mother as to Patrick’s whereabouts. Things are about to get nasty.
Oliver describes the sadism of the era with some relish: traitors may be hoisted on spikes hammered in between their legs; they may have their skin peeled from their bodies while they are still alive. Women are identified wholly with cities when they are sacked and pillaged; they represent the body of a people and thus can only expect rape from invading forces. John Grant grows up to become a mercenary under the tutelage of Badr Khassan, forever wandering until his mentor, on his deathbed, demands that his charge hunt out and protect the daughter he barely knows.
And so this historical romance becomes a tale of fathers and daughters, mothers and sons. Appearances are not what they seem, and when Oliver moves the action to the Byzantine court, which is being besieged by the forces of the Sultan, his interest in this somewhat mythical aspect takes over. John discovers his mother is not who he thought she was while, in a parallel narrative, the Emperor’s crippled son is engaged to a young woman who also has reason to doubt her parentage. Oliver plays with this sense of obscured origins for a time, as John’s special gift, his ability to sense the presence of others long before they appear, adds to this notion of obscurity.
But he won’t allow himself to forget this is a romance. This is to his credit in some areas, his detriment in others. Romance likes a cliché or three, and Oliver doesn’t disappoint, with phrases like "his body was racked with sobs", "loneliness pooled around her" and so on. Emotion is primary and often predictable, with far too many similes clogging up the narrative. But his description of battle scenes and the siege of Constantinople is superior in both detail and immediacy.
Daringly, and perhaps controversially, he has also introduced a ‘what if’ element to the story, which, as it enters about a quarter of the way in, has to be mentioned. It’s not spoiling too many surprises to say that he gives us an alternative history to the fate of Joan of Arc: not burnt to death by the English at Rouen after all, she has escaped to become an Amazonian warrior type hiding out in Spain, and John Grant’s destiny is to be by her side. Historical romance readers are not easy to predict, though, and it will be interesting to see how they respond to this factual reinvention. Some real-life figures from history have, of course, always had a hint of speculation about their ends: we only have to think of Anastasia Romanov, for example. And a fantasy alternative is always fun: what if, for instance, Anne Boleyn had had a boy?
The problem with Oliver’s alternative version of the Maid of Orleans’ fate, though, is that there is neither enough real-life speculation about her death, nor is this romance quite fantastical enough, to allow for that kind of imaginative indulgence. Oliver has shown himself here to be a worthy contender in the competitive pool of historical romance writing, more than well equipped to take on the likes of Philippa Gregory, say, or Alison Weir. Whether readers will swallow his wholesale reinvention of the outcome of a major historical figure’s life, though, is another question entirely.
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