The Devil’s Monk is set in the turbulent days after the reign of Alfred. The background, then, is a time of enormous transition for Britain. There was political and military struggle, as Angles, Saxons, and Danes contended for mastery of the land and the older British tribes were squeezed out. There was religious change, as Christianity gradually lured people away from the older gods. And, at least for the central character of this book, Bald, there is personal transformation, as he decides over a period of years what he can contend with and what must simply be accepted.

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Buy The Devil’s Monk from Amazon.com

Bald, through whom we witness the events and people of the age, is a herbalist. He is known to the modern age through the pages of an old medical text, The Leechbook of Bald, now in the British LIbrary. Jack has done a good job of filling in a hypothetical biography for Bald. It is never altogether clear whether Bald’s medical successes are due to the remedies he prepares, or the result of sympathetic attention to the real causes of malaise. Even today, cures and healings sometimes defy explanation, and Bald’s world view is well suited to his role, being deeply rooted in the old ways, with a weak grasp of the healing role of Christ as sufferer overlaid on top.

On a storytelling level, it took me a while to settle in to this book, since the first part seemed rather disjointed. As the dichotomy of Bald’s simultaneous power and impotence came to the fore, the tale held me more. Secondary characters also get more development in the later stages. It is not a fast paced book, but the subject matter does not require it to be, and the story is better suited to the slow unravelling of hearts, lives, and nations that we find in the pages. There are frequent citations from the herbal manual woven into the plot, together with a few extracts from the poetry of the age; these add to the atmosphere, though the translation used from the Old English is sometimes heavy going.

Overall for me this was a four star book. I enjoyed reading about the history of places which I know in contemporary England – Eashing, Winchester, London, York and Glastonbury among others. The historical research which has gone into the book seems solid. However, it was a book which interested me intellectually rather than engaged me emotionally. I would have enjoyed it more if the emotional dimension had been more accessible.

At about the same time I also read A Twisted Cross by the same author, an exploration of one of the crusades. Here I felt that Jack had not given himself enough narrative space to do his subject justice. Social differences and prejudices are well handled, but religious views less so, and in a way which to me spoke more of modern habits of thought than medieval ones. The short format left too much unexplored about a potentially fascinating period and range of characters. This book would have gained a lot by having the same systematic exploration of the main character as was done for Bald in The Devil’s Monk.

Unsurprisingly, After Flodden is set in the aftermath of the 1513 Battle of Flodden, which was a major disaster for the Scottish cause. The battle itself, and some other background information, is described in flashback scenes, with the main narrative occurring after the event during the closing months of 1513. Each chapter is marked with a date, and since they do not always happen in chronological order it can be important to take note of this.

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Buy After Flodden from Amazon.com

Rosemary deals with the wider political stage only in passing, and for the most part we follow particular individuals as they try to come to terms with the battle and its aftermath. These individuals each have personal reasons for wanting to know more, ranging from a desperate quest for a family member to the desire to find a scapegoat for the failure. The various threads interact with one another from an early stage of the book, so you are not left wondering how the pieces join up. However, some aspects of motive and personal history are deliberately withheld until near the end.

Rosemary uses dialect a great deal in the book, to distinguish both social class and geographic origin. In particular, characters from Scotland itself speak differently from those on the borders in what is now Northumberland. I am very fond of that county, and it was good to see it being explored in this way. The most likeable characters, and the ones treated most sympathetically, are precisely those from along this turbulent strip of constantly debated land. I cannot say how accurate the dialect is, but it certainly works to help place the characters.

However, I found the story as a whole slightly perplexing. The “whodunit” thread trying to account for the military disaster did not sit very comfortably, to my eyes, with the exploration of personal loyalty and love, and it felt as though too much importance was being put on the shoulders of one rather insignificant family. The fact that the chapters following the main events (ie not the flashback moments) were almost, but not quite, in temporal order did not help here.

A retreat into catatonia is used quite often in the book to basically get a character out of the way. In some cases it is a consequence of battle trauma, in others there is a hereditary factor, and in others it seems to be simply a response to the failure of plans and intentions. I found this repeated refrain, mixed with the diversity of causes, to be rather frustrating. Perhaps Rosemary was trying to mirror something of the condition of Scotland in this, where national trauma and the failure of grand schemes backfired into a turmoil of internal violence and insanity. Since she does not foreground the national dimensions of life, it is hard to tell.

For me, another 4* book. The place and time of After Flodden were interesting, and the use of dialect added considerably to the characters, but I found the story itself a little disjointed. I would have liked some exploration of the national narratives as well as personal. After all, it would be less than 100 years from this point of violent incompatibility between England and Scotland, up until the act of union in which a joint ruler was acknowledged. It is very hard from within the book to see how this would be at all feasible.

Augustus, by John Williams, was another book club choice: I’m not sure that I would have picked it out myself. I have come away with mixed feelings. It is very obviously a carefully written book, intricately written entirely in epistolary form. Strictly, not all sections are letters, as we have diary entries, military orders, official records and such like as well. However, every part has a sense of formally constructed distance – we are not experiencing things as they happen, but rather we are shown a highly selected series of personal reflections on events.

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Buy Augustus from Amazon.com

Although the progress of recounted events proceeds almost entirely in linear order, the time sequence of the reflections themselves is extremely nonlinear. A letter written just hours after a key moment is followed by a memoir extract from decades later. Likewise, the perspectives offered by the writers range from enthusiastic through manipulative to hostile. Most of the entries are acutely conscious of the political games being played, and are seeking to influence others one way or another. There is a constant sense that nobody’s words can really be trusted.

This was certainly an interesting ploy, but one which for me did not quite work. The cast of involved people was very large, and their writing styles not sufficiently diverse for me to pick them out easily. John identifies each sender and recipient in a short header, as well as the date of the item, but I found it all too easy to forget after a couple of page turns, and on a Kindle it was not easy to flick back to the header to remind myself. It is, I think, a book which actually needs to be read in a physical copy, with the consequent ease of keeping your thumb in a page and flipping to and fro. Indeed, I realised half-way through that you really need a large diagram beside you tracing who knows whom and the nature of each relationship (which changes through time).

I think the book might work for those who like political machinations. So far as I was concerned, I started to think quite early on that I wasn’t really interested in who was trying to deceive whom and why. By the time I thought of tracking relationships on paper, I had already ceased to really care who won and who lost, since their personal plots and preoccupations did not interest me (despite apparently deciding the fate of the Roman world).

There are three main divisions of the book. The first is male dominated and follows the saga to the defeat of Mark Anthony, at which point Rome is free of civil war. A second, with a higher proportion of female voices, takes us through to Augustus’s successful defeat of a last conspiracy against him. The final, much briefer, section is almost entirely a soliloquy of Augustus himself, close to death and reflecting on his life. Each stage sees him gain something and lose something, and the reader is left to decide if the gain was worth the loss.

Overall a modest four star book for me. I am glad to have read it, but cannot imagine reading it again. It is carefully constructed, but left me cold, partly because the overwhelming majority of the book concerns itself with an elite group of men that I cannot identify with. I think it was reasonably well researched, but am not enough of an expert on Roman history to know for sure, and there were a couple of places in the Egyptian section that I was very dubious about. If you like immersing yourself in Roman politics, you may well love this book – but make sure you read it with pen and paper beside you to keep track of the intricate web of personal interactions.