I have written about many of the places I visited in recent years. What has been a little curious to me is how these trips lined up too with the novel I had been wrestling with before I started to travel. I had kind of beaten it into a still unwieldy second draft before putting it down in 2023, around the time I picked up the Substack “pen”.
I’m a little slower paced on here because I’m beginning to dust off the manuscript and give it some judicious slicing and kneading, and there are strong premonitory echoes in there of places I have been and written about since 2023 when I started the Substack (with my central European travelogue).
Most obviously, perhaps, is the scene in which one of my protagonists hangs out with a medieval alchemist in Granada. Written long before I wandered by chance into the museum of alchemy in Cordoba. The play of elements, between the discrete and physical, and the elegance of the organically spiritual, was something my visit affirmed that my writing had already guessed at. I’m already contemplating a second volume of fiction, long before completing the first one, to incorporate the new learnings my feet have taken me to.
In truth, this emerging novel has its origins far from that kind of Andalusian sophistication, in wilder places like pre Roman Britain. I guess the original conceit was formed while wondering about the last time Britain was “indigenous”. Those missing druids about to snuff themselves out with the arrival of the Romans two thousand years ago. Rather famously, the Romans found the druids so terrible that they chased the last ones to the island of Anglesey off the Welsh coast, and slaughtered them all in their final stand. Still more famously, we don’t officially know what they stood for, except through disapproving Roman eyes. But we can guess, and Getafix (or Panoramix as he’s known in the original French, rather more poetically) is the archetype. Wise sage, working with herbs, befuddling those imperial types. Men and women sharing the lead in wisdom-sharing, as indeed they did in battle and government, much to the disgust of those OG patriarchs on the Roman side.
Though I also rather enjoyed the idea of writing about people who had lived powerful lives and are totally unrecorded by history. There is so much about history, especially the further back we go, that is speculation. We imagine the druids to be speaking some sort of Celtic language like old Welsh or old Irish. But we don’t actually know. This is where we can justifiably conjure up the past in ways that are a little bit challenging and inspiring. My other tendency in this story has been to find powerful female characters at the margins, and occasionally have them drop in surprisingly on the masculine medieval world.
So off in search of these imagined and clutched-for ancestors, my scribbling went. Last year, I returned to many of those ancient sites in the southwest of Britain, where no doubt the druid tribes hung out. How much of a genuine lineage there was between them and the earlier peoples that built Stonehenge and Avebury and Sidbury Hill and the rest we don’t know, any more than who built the barrow tomb structures at Newgrange and the rest. In Ireland I discovered that the druids never died, they just turned into Celtic Christians, or at least that’s how the mythology would have it.
Anyway, one interesting notion that came my way was the discovery of the skull there in an Irish barrow of a character that was the child of an incestuous relationship. This led to all kinds of speculation about Ireland having similarities to the pharaonic practice of royal incest in Egypt. It seems, however, to have been just speculation... But still, it had already popped up, to my own surprise at what my pen was doing, as a key question in the magical opening act of the novel.
The two key protagonists of the novel are two human-spirit-crows. Again, I’d already started writing about them when a friend told me that Celtic culture did indeed recognize the Morrigan: a crow-woman, a shapeshifting magician. I won’t indulge you in the story of how the crows called me to write this novel in the first place, which is its own kind of magic. Suffice to say that two of them flew overhead when I finally got the point. Messages from spirit, which the book is rather overflowing with at the moment.
Paul Kingsnorth would not agree with my earlier point that Celtic mythology turned straight into the Celtic church, as he’s explored the more genuinely interesting lives of the Celtic “wild saints”. He’s pointed out that St Brigid has a rather more interesting story than just being a reinterpretation of the ancient goddess Bridget, as us New Age discoverers of ancient Celtic women would have it. He also became an Orthodox Christian in recent years, having been an Extinction Rebellion leader before that. I’m not a Christian, preferring my gods darkly feminine and riding tigers, or Shiva-shamanic and elephant-headed, but perhaps if I were, Orthodox might be the route that appealed to me. I’ve always liked the fact that meditation seemed to be a central possibility in the east, as well as plenty of arcane ritual bordering on magic that the tediously Protestant got rid of on their route to capitalism and a Christianity based on “hard work”. Even earlier, there was a great doctrinal split back in the ninth century, the first between Orthodox and Catholic; because Catholic bishops said humans don’t have a spirit, only a soul. And the Orthodox East gave that idea the theological middle finger, as it deserves. I’ve never been to Russia, and yet quite a chunk of the novel ended up in Siberia, where shamans and nomads trade words and prayers with Orthodox saints. One is modelled loosely on the wonderful story of a monk in the far north who rode down the river on a floating boulder, thus managing to perform a miracle, without showing the presumptuousness it would have needed to actually walk on water directly like the Son.
Every year I teach medieval history to teenagers; and every year I also point out the “negative image”, in photographic terms: the bulk of humanity who didn’t live in feudal hierarchies at the time, but in tribes. Originally I included a more “early modern” piece set in the Cape Colony back when it was a Dutch state-capitalist entreprise. But that has gone for now: the inevitable African section has had to take place further north and on the tribal edge of the same medieval world which we see in its own genre-hopping form in north and west Africa.
One day, I hope, I’ll go to Ethiopia, which pops up unnamed and tangentially along the way in the story, with echoes of connections to the middle East. But I have at least been again to Normandy, last year, where a key object ends up in the novel, transported from ancient Britain in time for the later travellers in the book, who are on their way to participate in a daring ritual under the noses of the authorities.
I won’t give away more of the ultimate plotline. I’m about to test drive the beta version of the novel. If you’d like to try a version of the first three chapters, set in Britain, Siberia, the Himalayas, and somewhere between Persia and Rome, in a range from about 60CE to about 1380... Well, pop me a line. Later chapters head in that direction of the infamous medieval world of western Europe: experimenting with strict control of belief, and on the edge of heading off to attack and take over the world, but the novel still stops long before our gruesome shared recent story. My old medieval history professor once upon a time was delighted that I would choose to look more into humans at such a decent distance from our own age of often grotesquely simplistic ideologies. If you can read all about it in the newspaper it's probably not worth much more than the average president's promise. The medieval age is weird, and to empathize with the humans of the time has always seemed to me to require a deep willingness to enquire, beyond our obvious modern judgements.
I guess another question I had in writing this was how to write a novel that genuinely subverts the classic notions of violent conflict being the key action points of history. What if the key moments had nothing to do with battles and the rulers that thought they were in charge. What if “history” is left without knowing anything of what actually changed things? And what if a story could be told that privileges people who had bloody great, empowered and inspiring lives, and never made it into the history books of the men that “won”?
Perhaps this is all too philosophical: I’m trying to get into the minds of interesting characters and their passions I guess. I must confess that reading Entering the Circle years ago (Olga Kharitidi’s extraordinary shamanic memoir) definitely inspired the creative journey.
I'd like to share this to a limited number of readers. Paying subscribers get first option on taking a look at the first three beta-version chapters if you’d like, but free subscribers who are keen to look at something new and give me a line or two in response are welcome to enquire too, I will have some spots available for you too! And if you really enjoy it, there are more beta chapters almost ready to fly where they came from (14 in total). Pop me a message to express interest if you’re in a fiction-reading moment :) (I say that because sometimes I am, and sometimes I’m not. Just enjoying Aminatta Forna’s “Ancestor Stones” At present, set in Sierra Leone, as well as revisiting a few wonderful themes in Underland, Robert Macfarlane’s nonfiction exploration of our relationship with the world beneath our feet.)
There will be more essays and musings on here soon too, for those less interested in my imaginary stuff. Beginning with an overdue look at midwinter, which fast approaches!