Antonia Senior, Margaret Skea

The cover is inviting. Weathered, sea-green and silver, studded with a Celtic shield and heraldic medallions. Elegant medieval-ish script. Inside the back flap, an appealing you-can-trust-me colour photo of the author, who is also a freelance journalist. Women-friendly indeed, in what is quite a macho market.

We begin, ready – hoping – to be transported, spirited off…

For one whose "heritage is Ireland and Yorkshire, mangled through a London childhood", Senior does a very creditable job of connecting landscape to character, and of turning herself into a charismatic fighting man. There’s passionate love and battlefield gore, and everything between, all human life from birth to last breath. We get moral dilemmas (personal honour/public fame), and – the novel’s constant – we sail among the islands themselves, beautiful and implacable.

It is epic historical fiction (or fairly so, just under 400 pages), to perfectly suit modern tastes.

Meanwhile I was remembering a name from my youth – Orcadian George Mackay Brown. He worked a very curious effect with his stories, as if he was of that far-off time when fables were real. As an occasional reader of historical fiction I want to know how people once thought and felt. Writing it, that’s the difficult part. Perhaps contemporary readers would find Mackay Brown a little precious, arch, each word like a polished stone. Hovering between prose and verse, his style appears simple and inevitable, handed down to us.

He underwrites, which I mean as a compliment. Senior composes in what we think of as a poetic fashion. Lots of sensitivity, fetching imagery, beautiful moments. But somehow it also feels rather strained, and overwritten. Presumably folk of the twelfth century oathed an eff’d and called excrement something else, but that – like the swirling currents of the story – has the disorientating effect of dragging you back to now, before we’re stilled by another vignette of sky-and-horizon timelessness.

I would outlaw the listing of books consulted, which completely destroys the illusion of fiction plucked out of the air. I don’t wish to know how much work went into a novel, and begin to wonder just how much or how little is owing to the writer’s imagination. I don’t fret over which part of the legend (here, Somerled’s, in Gaelic or Norse form) is true, if that can ever be the case, and which synthetic. The author’s job is no more and no less than to cast a spell, to bewitch us – and no joins showing.

Battles and violence help sell historical novels, and Margaret Skea (Beryl Bainbridge Best First Time Novelist 2014) goes for the feuding and foul treachery angle in A House Divided. (Witch-hunting too, in this busy saga of skulduggery in the Cunninghame lands of 1590s Ayrshire – with some Picardy scenes for good measure.) The black-and-white cover is very stark, and rather forbidding: the photograph of a fortified keep. (We get the message.) The prose is less studied, more workmanlike (not a rebuke), and the author as in the prequel, Turn of the Tide, concentrates on plot. This is a heads-down, let’s-get-on-with-the-story kind of book. There’s a check-list of characters, and an assurance of their existence (Cunninghames, their foes the Montgomeries; Kings of Scotland and France; Mistress Aitken, the witch who turned in her fellow witches).

It’s ably done. But are we in the minds of 1597, or following the template of Hollywood biopic (prompts as to who is who), crossed with all-action derring-do?

Quite by chance, a few days before the books arrived, I had started The Bull from the Sea by the peerless Mary Renault. It’s very hard to put your finger on just what it is that makes her Greek novels live. She is now a little undervalued, I think, because she seems to be too politically incorrect – giving us the man’s view rather than the woman’s. In The Winter Isles Somerled’s story is counterpointed by that of (I put it crudely) proto-feminist Eimhear and wife Ragnhild. It is blithely assumed by editors that we should "see ourselves" in those ancient forbears.

Mary Renault’s approach was quite subversive, and far ahead of current editorial thinking, in that she discarded fixed notions of gender: she identified with homosexual characters, and hinted at a naturally bisexual condition elsewhere – or so it strikes me.

The title A House Divided is fine. Not that the novels are in competition, but The Winter Isles may have the edge. Have you noticed that titles which refer to winter and cold and snow and ice have a tendency to do rather well in the bookshops?