Mark Valentine
After a sly introduction in which the narrator purportedly gets a transcript of an ancient manuscript from the hand of a descendant of the character who was Greenmantle in John Buchan’s novel, this unusual and distinctive work next presents a translation of that document.
This is said to be from the medieval Latin of the magician and astrologer Michael Scott, with intercalations by later hands, seemingly a Templar and a Rosicrucian. Scott recounts, for the edification of a princely pupil, the fortunes of Marcus, a Roman patrician youth, thought by some to be the son of an archangel and a mortal woman, who is accompanied by a few devoted comrades: they are subjected to kidnappings, piracy, imprisonment, assaults on their virtue (which they cannot always resist), sorcery, war and fever.
This episodic rendition of a sequence of marvellous encounters suggests, as it is no doubt meant to, such classical romances as The Golden Ass of Apuleius; Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and the Satyricon of Petronius. Like those, there is a healthy and invigorating mingling of carnality and mysticism. But there is also a weakness here, in a certain remorseless over-determinism and single-threadedness about the plot: the author rather rushes Marcus through and past too many of the characters, scenes and beliefs of the period, as if in haste to encompass it all.
Nevertheless, the novel is highly impressive for its erudition, swiftly-drawn sensuality, pithy prose and lightly-worn worldliness and arcane wisdom. Massie conjures up for us well a time when paganism and Christianity were still mingled, when old altars and gods were not quite yet deserted, when the new faith was taking on some of the legends and lore of the old. And he shows us a Europe where the line between the ‘barbarian’ and the ‘civilised’ is also not quite as demarcated as history suggests.
There is very little in historical fiction that is quite of the same order: an exception might be Baron Corvo’s coruscating Renaissance romance Don Tarquinio. We are promised two more volumes from Alan Massie in this sequence, though each is complete in itself: the next takes us to the age of Arthur, and should be very interesting indeed.
