I had heard of this book years ago: a not quite alternate history of late medieval Europe. Its strong points come down to the originality of the ideas - where other alternate histories propose a branch with an alternate future, this novel gives us an alternate past. Many of its weak points, to my tastes, relate to its claim to be the longest fantasy novel ever written. Consequently, I directly confess that I got about a quarter of the way through the book, then started skimming and searching (on reader device) to find the sections that I wanted to read.
The Good
Gentle paints us a fifteenth century Europe that is familiar, but subtly different. In many alternate histories, the characters are mere mouthpieces for the branchpoint, and wander around effectively saying "Woe is us, if only War X had gone differently, then Y and Z would be so much better but all is lost!" The changes are presented more subtly, and they accrete around the characters (who have their own lives and motivations) until you know you're somewhen else. Lions and leopards were not driven to extinction. Christ was not a Jew, but a Mithraist centurion, and he was executed by being nailed to a tree, hence the epithet "Green Christ!" being cast about by the mercenaries in the book. And of course, Carthage still exists, an Arianist civilization of Visigoths that persisted through medieval times. She takes pains to immerse us in this age's sights and sounds and smells (to a fault, as discussed below.)
So much alternate history is about a war ending differently, but the best ones concern a technology arriving early or late, or a cultural commitment changing. In Barnes's Lion's Blood series, Socrates goes to Egypt instead of drinking the hemlock concoction, tipping history in favor of Africa over Europe. In Stephen Baxter's Anti-Ice, the discovery of antimatter effectively initiates the nuclear age a century early during the Crimean War. In this novel, we have remote communication, tactical computers, and robots five centuries early.
The originality of the ideas is what sets this book apart. It's not just the elements of alternate history noted above. The underlying plot is that Wild Machines - a sort of mineral Boltzmann brain, pyramids of electromagnetic stone in North Africa that achieved sentience under mysterious conditions - are using the Visigoths to drive humanity to extinction. Their motive is that they can simulate the future, and that some humans have an ability to bend reality itself (make actual miracles) and that in the future, this ability will become more and more common, and eventually will be used in warfare, thus destroying the universe. The military leader of the Visigoths was bred to be able to communicate mentally over long distances with a machine of the pyramids' design, and the main character Ash discovers she is a product of the same breeding program. Most of the children in the program do not have the ability and are executed, but Ash was smuggled out as a child and later ended up still developing the ability to some degree. The machines absorb sunlight for energy so night falls over any lands they conquer.
The book is much better for the framing device of correspondence from a historian, who is watching the modern world inexplicably change around her as the secret history re-emerges. When library books start recategorizing themselves in defiance of the correspondents' memories, this definitely propelled me forward. I wanted to solve the problem, and know - was there a network of people trying to discredit the discoveries by categorizing the books as fantasy? Or as it turned out, some more fundamental causal process? Without the framing device there would have been no way to express the idea of how the alternative past changed in its relation to us. I also found myself thinking a lot about conspiracy theorist historians like Anatoly Fomenko. The concept of there being a secret history different than the one familiar to us, obviously opens up space to discuss how we know what we know, and who wrote the history, and why they included the things they did. There are hints of this, but never a full exploration. But the novel isn't about that - it's about a kind of "ideal" medieval history that vanished with Burgundy. I think Neal Stephenson's Anathem had a similar idea, with the world Arbre being in some ways the ideal of history and even geography that Earth is reaching toward.
I thought I knew something about medieval European history, but like many with no formal education in this area I knew basically nothing about Burgundy - a point that seems to have inspired the novel in large part.
The Neutral, and Questions
During the chaos of the fourth and fifth centuries, Germanic tribes really did occupy Spain and parts of North Africa. The Vandals crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and sacked Hippo shortly after Augustine's death. The Visigoths conquered Spain, and Rome effectively let them keep it in exchange for fighting Rome's enemies when the time came. As noted above, the Visigoths were Arianist, a now-dead branch of Christianity practiced mostly among the German tribes, which considered Christ a prophet rather than the son of the Christian God (like modern Islam does with Mohammed.) In real life, Visigoth Arianism survived the fall of Rome, but the Visigoths were converted to the Church of Rome in the sixth century by Saint Leander, and then were conquered by the Moors in the eighth century. Their four-century reign in Spain did not leave a massive imprint on Spanish civilization, arguably even less than that of the Mongols in Russia: besides royal court rules that survived even the Muslim conquest, the main echo of Visigoth culture we see today is the -ez suffix on Spanish names, which was the genitive marker in the Visigoth language, essentially their version of apostrophe-s in English. That is to say, Martinez means "Martin's", as in Martin's son. To summarize, there really was a land ruled by the Visigoths, but they didn't survive the Muslim conquests. While admittedly it's an interesting thought, had the Visigoths taken Carthage, it's hard to see how they would have had any more impact, or still be seen as a distinct force, as long as Islam and the Moors and Ottomans still arise. This is also similar to books imagining a Europe conquered by the Mongols: the continent is often pictured as an oppressed and desolate ruin under a kind of Mongol thousand-year reich, when back in the real world, China was conquered by the Mongols, who held it for two centuries like a typical Chinese dynasty. Today the Middle Kingdom appears to have recovered nicely, and I don't know many Chinese today who sit around crying about how things would be better if the Mongols never came.
I also wondered if she was influenced by Joan of Arc's schizophrenia, since there is a sub-sub-genre of alternate history where historical figures who had supernatural experiences or heard voices was actually talking to aliens or people from the future, for example Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (Columbus might have been a merchant to newly-Turkish Constantinople, not even a footnote to Marco Polo, without his vision on a beach telling him to do something different.)
I did like how well she thought through the effects of prolonged darkness over Europe - the frost, the anticipated famines, the itchy feelings of wanting things to return to normal while having to get on with life. Since it was ultimately the sentient pyramids draining the light, it would have been interesting to hear speculation from the characters (or direct admission from the Wild Machines) about how they could have accounted for the three days of darkness during the Ten Deadly Plagues of Egypt (a place with no shortage of pyramids.) When darkness suddenly fell, I actually found this unsettling. At first I thought it was an eclipse that the Visigoths were capable of anticipating but the Europeans were not; then when it did not relent, possibly the sun going out (no, the moon is still visible) or something in space over Europe blocking it (no, they can see the stars.) But it was the Wild Machines. I did wonder why the Machines don't slurp down even the last bit of energy from the moon and starlight as well.
In the end, the "secret" history starts re-emerging into our own, with the discovery of golems at Carthage. The Wild Machines' motivation was to keep humans from redeveloping their miracle-working talent. Could it be said that the scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries presaged this? But I don't think so - the miracle-working is a much more direct ability to bend reality.
As a curiosity, the god-king of blogging Andrew Sullivan once pointed out how movie scripts and novels today tend to avoid showing or discussing communication technology. There are lots of movies up until the 1990s where the plot hinges on not being able to get to a phone to talk to somebody, and of course these are all now dated; possibly writers are consciously avoiding this. It's not plot-critical, but reading this 1999 book in 2024, it sticks out that the characters in the framing device portion of the novel are having trouble finding a computer to send email.
The Bad
The book is long. As you can see in the first image above, it's actually four books merged into one, when it could have been one book merged into one. While I liked the sensory descriptions, and appreciated the occasional explanation of characters' roles, the repeated description of the camp, of mercenary life and weapons and equipment and the overemphasis on certain assumptions about life medieval people made differently from us, became laborious very quickly. In particular, I was very tired of hearing about how dirty the surgeon was - yes, you've established it, we know, you don't have to describe it yet again. There can be no doubt that Gentle is an expert in these things, and there would still have been no doubt if she included just ten percent of the amount she did. This is the main reason why I began skimming and term-searching about twenty-five percent of the way through. There's also far too much space toward the end of the novel given to describing how the quantum wave-function collapsing works. Difficult to wade through, not coherent, not interesting, not useful for thinking about anything. There is a similar resistance to editing a made-up technical process in other novels, for example the bone-reading in Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, or intelligent proton-printing in Liu's Three Body Problem.
The second reason I stopped when I did is that there was a shift in Ash's character around the time she met the Faris, her nemesis-twin. Up until then, I quite liked her - she had come from horrible beginnings and suffered life's unfair slings and arrows, and did the best she could for herself and the people around her with her resilience and her sharp mind. She even had her ways of standing against the gross sexism all around her, for example by choosing to actually enjoy sex with her politically expedient husband (a fact he was obviously uncomfortable with.) Then she meets the Faris, and becames this new shouting, split-minded character often just wandering among events as a passenger rather than driving them. Could this kind of destabilization not be the effect of meeting a more successful, attractive (physically un-scarred in this case) version of yourself? Fair enough, and it's true that the more I thought about this change in her character, the less I disliked it - in the abstract. But that's the benefit of distance from it - while you're reading, it's not abstract, and it quickly became irritating.
The novel suffers from a difficulty shared by any novel purporting to be a historical text: the style of modern English fiction isn't even two centuries old. You're therefore either left with the choice of writing something basically unreadable to a modern audience but that's similar to what might have been produced at the time, or something readable and anachronistic. It's hard to suspend disbelief for this reason. To her credit, Gentle does mention that medieval artists and writers did not think it was strange to put characters from ancient Greece into modern clothing or situations, because they did not have the same idea of progress that we've developed during the industrial age - to them, they assumed everyone would have thought and acted and dressed the same a thousand years ago. I think she was winking at the reader that she knows by putting it into this style she's doing the same thing. That said, I submit that most anachronisms are not intentional on the writer or artist's part, but merely out of ignorance. It just didn't occur to Da Vinci that the clothes the apostles wore were different than Italian merchants during the Renaissance. It just didn't occur to Shakespeare as he was writing Julius Caesar that there were no paper books or pockets in Rome. It's simply a mistake, understandable given the knowledge available to them at the time.
This is possibly the most imaginative alternate history novel I've ever read, so much so that I'm not even sure that's the right genre. In the end, I'm glad I read it but also glad I skimmed it.
