Sex and virginity in the ancient near East

I read quite a lot of historical fiction, skewed towards the ancient near East (ANE) since that is also the era that I write about. Along with that, I read quite a lot of fantasy or science fiction as well. Both genres seem to attract a lot of writing where both male and female characters are squeamish and culturally embarrassed at the thought of sex.

Now, for the ANE at least, and most likely for a much wider spectrum of places and times, this is a retrospective projection of relatively modern attitudes, rather than an accurate portrayal. After all, most people throughout history have lived in small houses where parents and children share a single room. Their survival depended on a good knowledge of animal husbandry and an awareness of natural cycles. Sex was not a mystery, except in the very human sense that intimacy with another person is always a mystery.

But as well as that, ancient texts spell out the same picture. For example, biblical Hebrew does not have a word meaning “virgin“. Now, it does have a word which later translators chose – and often still choose today – to render as “virgin” – namely, bethulah. But the best analysis of its original sense was “a woman of an age where she could be married but is not” rather than “a woman who has never had sex“. The very fact that a handful of biblical passages go to great lengths to expand the description with extra phrases – for example Rebekah is described in Genesis as “very beautiful, a bethulah; no man had ever lain with her” – should alert the careful reader to the fact that bethulah of itself does not necessarily suggest innocence.

I have read suggestions that a translation which would convey better meaning to a typical modern reader would be “teenager“, although that carries an idea of a specific age band which is foreign to the original. In former days, perhaps “nubile” would have worked, but today that seems to carry the idea of wilful cheerleader-style flaunting of sexuality.

Basically, we do not have an English word which works quite right, and translation choices seem mostly to be based on later Jewish, Christian, or general social views on how women around and after puberty ought to behave. We are faced with a translation based on a sense of morality rather than linguistics.

Egyptian scene – adoration of Anat (British Museum)
Egyptian scene - adoration of Anat (British Museum)

Considerably north of Israel, on what is now the coast of Syria, was the city of Ugarit. This was sacked and abandoned soon after 1200BC, and is a rich source of textual and archaeological material. One of the goddesses celebrated there, Anat, is clearly adult in her actions, and in her authoritative status within the pantheon. A title used frequently for her is betulat (a variant of the Hebrew word). Anat has no husband, betrothed partner, or regular consort. The texts are a little ambiguous as to whether she engaged in sex, but are commonly read to indicate this. Now, whatever your personal feelings about gods and goddesses in the ancient world, they certainly mirror something normative in and representative of their society. So here we have a word-picture of an adult woman, probably sexually active, who is nevertheless referred to as betulat.

Down in Egypt, a considerable number of love poems have been found, mostly from the New Kingdom (roughly 1550-1100 or so BC). The basic presumption of the poems is that young men and women were able to interact with one another and explore one another’s sexuality. There was a significant gap between puberty and settled relationships or marriage. Family and social context provides an obstacle to their interaction, but not an insuperable one. Was all this just wishful thinking on the part of frustrated scribes? That is possible, of course, but it seems more likely that it reflects actual practice for some parts of society.

The voice of the swallow twitters away –
this is his cry:
      “The land is dawning! Get up on your way!”

But don’t, small bird speak thus:
      I found my brother in his bed,
      my soul with sweetness overflowed.

So all in all, the available evidence from the ANE in the second millennium BC is that virginity was not a status to be guarded or prized in a young woman in the rather possessive way done later on, and that sex was not a source of embarrassment. That certainly came along at a later date, at least for some social groups, but is not a universal feature of societies through history. Pregnancy would be a constant background risk, but does not feature as a serious social threat for either men or women: greater social stigma was associated with childlessness. But that is a topic for another day!

Review -The Serpent and the Staff, by Barbara Wood

I really wanted to like The Serpent and the Staff, by Barbara Wood. Here was a historical fiction book claiming to address a place and time close to my own heart – the city of Ugarit (on the coast of modern Syria), in the time of the early New Kingdom Egyptian pharaohs Hatshepsut and Thutmose III. Sadly, however, I struggled to finish it, and cannot give more than three stars to it. Basically, it was a potentially good story spoiled by insufficient research.

First, the good stuff. As already mentioned, full marks for Barbara’s choice of place and time. The characters were (for the most part) interesting and well-crafted. The recurrent theme of herbal medicine and healing was a convincing thread around which to hang the story. The technical production of the Kindle copy was good, with a mere handful of very minor slips in a long book.

Where I struggled, however, was with the intended historical rooting of the people and plot. Barbara has apparently done far too little background research into the period to be able to write persuasively about it. And I am not talking about research taking several years and a PhD, but a very ordinary level of background reading from reliable sources readily available on the Internet.

U Chicago image – an Ugaritic ritual text
U Chicago image - an Ugaritic ritual text

I abandoned the whole book for several weeks at the point where a long passage digresses to celebrate one of the protagonists inventing the alphabet. If you want to enjoy a fictional presentation of this, you would go a long way to beat The TwentyTwo Letters by Clive King. But there is plenty of readily accessed technical material about the relative roles of the different competing scripts of this age, and the sheer uphill struggle alphabetic scripts had in gaining acceptance. The naivety of the description here, on top of the difficulties I was already finding in the book with iron weapons factories being set up (way way way too early), fictitious kinglists (when we have real ones), Egyptian chariots with four horses (like everyone else’s they had two), and a rather cavalier approach to geography, led me to close the book and give up on it.

However, I returned after a couple of months, partly out of a sense of duty and partly through stubbornness. I decided that the best way to read the book was as a kind of fantasy story without any actual real-world context. Taken on that level, and pretending to myself that the storyline had nothing to do with the start of the Late Bronze Age in the Levant, it was quite a fun romp. The outcome was never really a surprise – my main uncertainty was when and how a particularly brutal individual was going to reappear and unintentionally advance the fortunes of the protagonists.

In summary then – as fantasy I might well consider giving it four stars, though it could easily have been somewhat shorter without losing anything much. But as an intended work of historical fiction, and with all of the historical flaws and anachronisms, I cannot give it more than three. I do hope that Barbara will consider returning to this period – which has a great deal of intrinsic interest – but for my part it would need considerably more investment in background research.

Historical dialogue and translation

I have seen several blog articles recently on the subject of fictional dialogue. However, I have not yet seen any which have tackled the specific issue of dialogue in historical fiction. Most are concerned with matters such as use of slang or idiomatic language in contemporary writing – whether this works or not, how quickly it ceases to be relevant, and how to use it.

Status - Delos, GreeceHistorical fiction faces slightly different problems, though, and I want to tackle these over a few blog articles, especially as they are closely related to the translation of historical texts. For one thing, many of us who write about the past are also writing about people speaking another language – even the English of Chaucer’s time is quite different in certain ways from modern English. Along with a lot of other people, I write about a place and time where the characters’ language was scarcely related at all to English.

A reviewer of In a Milk and Honeyed Land commented that she felt that some of the dialogue was too modern, and in particular picked out my frequent use of “look” or “see“. We had a great discussion about this – one of those really positive online experiences. My basic answer was that in the Hebrew Bible, this is actually one of the more common words (hinneh). In older translations this is typically represented by “lo” or “behold“, and most modern translations simply omit it… ironically, given the discussion, because they consider it too archaic! Egyptian has a similar word (mek) which is also frequently used, and similar comments can be made of other languages of the region,

The basic idea is that this word pulls the reader or listener into the action alongside the protagonist. For example, in Genesis 15, Abram is protesting to God: “And Abram said, “Look, to me you have given no seed: and look, one born in my house is my heir.” (Both words “look” are variations of hinneh).

So from my point of view, my characters’ use of “look” or “see” is quite period-correct… but evidently it did not carry this idea to the reader in question, who herself writes historical fiction set in another age, so is very well informed.

This set me thinking about how to present historical dialogue. I suspect that for many people, “ho varlet, why dost dare stand before me? Unhand me and get onst thy knees!” would seem genuinely historical. But to my Late Bronze characters, such phrasing (always presuming that anybody actually spoke like that, which I suspect is unlikely) would be unthinkably far in the future.

This brings me to translation. By and large there are two schools of thought about this. One is to take the text and translate very literally, keeping as close as possible to the original words and sentence structure. This is usually associated with academic or other “serious” contexts. At another pole is an approach called “dynamic equivalence“, in which the translator basically tries to write what, in their opinion, the original author would have said if they were speaking today.

You can make a case for both of these, and just now I am not going to promote one way above the other. Pretty obviously, dynamic equivalence makes a text more accessible to a casual audience, but at the cost of deliberately discarding forms and patterns present in the original. In another blog post I’ll give some examples of this.

For today it’s enough just to open up this problem. How do you make your characters speak in ways that as author you are confident has roots in your period of choice… while at the same time persuading readers they are reading something set in the past?

I have read books which adopt the dynamic equivalence approach and simply use modern phrasing, on the grounds that this is how the people would speak if they were alive today. As a reader, this does not work for me, but I can see the logic. And clearly it is not suitable to write totally in the characters’ idiom – how many people would enjoy In a Milk and Honeyed Land or Scenes from a Life if the dialogue was in Canaanite, early Hebrew, or Egyptian? How far should one go in trying to capture something of their way of speech, and the occasional struggles of trying to communicate cross-culturally?

And how far, I wonder, does the problem extend to other genres? When might writers of fantasy or science fiction use archaic-sounding language to good effect? Quite apart from the general techno-babble style of things, I remember being fascinated by Isaac Asimov’s coining of the word “richified” (to mean “bribed“, of course) to signal a slightly backward world… though still with space flight and other things which are futuristic to us!

Review – Athame and Wrath by Morgan Alreth

ABNA General Ficton categoryTime for a review amongst all the excitement of Scenes from a Life and the ABNA awards.

So, this review covers the first two books in Morgan Alreth’s The Unfortunate Woods series – Athame and Wrath. The series continues in a third book which at the time of writing has not yet been released.

These are fantasy books, set in a world where humans are the most numerous species, but share the land (and especially the forest) with several other natural and supernatural life forms. Relationships between the species tend to drift from neutral towards hostile, with occasional times of cooperation for specific shared goals.

Magic is, as you might expect, a vital part of the setting. The magic system is based around the four classical elements (fire, water, earth, air), with connections to the four seasons as well as other binary or four-fold natural or human divisions. Each element is linked to a deity with suitable qualities. It seems to me to be fundamentally well thought-out, particularly in Wrath where there is more development of the interconnections. An important plot theme is that pretty much any serious use of magic tends to have unpredictable side-effects, small compared to the original purpose but needing to be taken into account.

Athame opens in a wild and dangerous forest. A woman living here, Jess, chooses to help a man, Pete, who is lost, saving his life from any number of potential threats. He turns out to be a significant player in the royal succession drama unfolding in the country. Unsurprisingly, but credibly, the two eventually become lovers.

The plot continues with Jess and Pete venturing out of the forest and back to the capital city. This turns out to be every bit as dangerous as the wild forest, but with human rather than exotic enemies. There are definite echoes of Crocodile Dundee here, though the gender roles are switched, and the couple here is much more equally matched in talent and ability.

Athame ends with them having resolved a serious external threat, but separating for what appear to be perfectly sensible and necessary reasons. However, this is a source of grief to both.

Wrath – over twice as long according to my kindle – tracks subsequent events. They start separately, in different regions of the world, as they try to resolve their individual destinies; both have to face different but significant threats. Eventually they reunite, but tact and spoiler avoidance forbids me saying how this turns out. Suffice it to say that their quest returns them to their country of origin, which by now has fallen into serious civil unrest.

The hints and clues you get about the third book indicate that the overall problems of succession and disunity will be resolved, perhaps with a level of reconciliation between the various non-human species as well.

So, the books are interesting, and many aspects of the world seem credible to me. What are the down sides? Firstly, there is a theme I have also encountered in some of Morgan’s other writing. Rural settings may well be dangerous, but are basically clean and honourable; rural individuals are poor and bluntly spoken but honest. In contrast, cities and towns – anything bigger than a handful of houses together – are filthy, disease-ridden, and full of cruel and wickedly motivated individuals. Countryside is good: towns are bad. I am not really convinced by this.

In Athame, another rather simple binary opposition is between organised religion (largely in the hands of men and fundamentally corrupt) and personal spirituality (largely in the hands of women and basically uplifting and respectable). Wrath is more nuanced about this, and smooths out the earlier stark contrast into lots of intermediate shades of a spectrum.

Another difficulty is with the opponents. I guess it is par for the course for fantasy heroes to get increasingly more powerful themselves, and have a coterie of increasingly powerful followers. But how do you then find worthy adversaries? Somehow, the filthy, disease-ridden cities and their temples manage to turn out a whole collection of fearsome, top-of-the range fighting men and magician-priests.

The production of the kindle copy is mixed. My copies were downloaded from Smashwords, and the rather patchy navigation may be a consequence of that site’s conversion software. However, there are a surprising number of spelling errors, format problems, and other minor issues which should have been caught during rounds of proof reading.

In summary, these two books still come out as four star books for me. Certainly worth the read if you like fantasy books, and the series develops some interesting ideas. The gradual build-up of the plot is credible. Speaking as a Brit, some of the dialogue rather grates, but US readers might appreciate it more. However, the flaws which I have mentioned diminished my enjoyment of the whole, and made me feel that Morgan could have lavished a little more care on the production of the books as well as the imaginative aspects. I do intend to catch up on the conclusion of the series in time, so these flaws have not deterred me from carrying on.

These books were made available to me without charge but with no expectation of a review.

Scenes from a Life ABNA Excerpt now available for free download

Well, Amazon have now made available the ABNA Excerpts as free kindle downloads at the various international sites. For Scenes from a Life, navigate to one of:

On the Amazon sites you can preview the first couple of pages, or download in kindle format the Excerpt for free. The Excerpt for Scenes from a Life was about 3750 words long – the upper limit was 5000 words, but I wanted to end the Excerpt at an obvious section break. It represents part but not all of Chapter 1.

General Fiction ABNA logo

You do not need an actual kindle device to read it as there are kindle viewers for all kinds of other platforms such as PC, Mac and so on.

Like any other purchase on Amazon, you can add your own reviews of the Excerpt. It’s not very clear how audience reviews feed into the next stage – the main judging is done by staff from Publishers Weekly who have access to the entire manuscript now. However, in addition to this “Amazon customers can download, rate, and review Excerpts on Amazon.com, providing feedback to Amazon Publishing Editors about submissions”. So if anybody is motivated to write such a review, I would very much appreciate it. There is about a month for this stage of the process, until May 23rd or thereabouts, and the names of those going through to the semi-finals are announced around June 13th.

Amazon ABNA expert review comments

At some stage soon the excerpts for all the ABNA quarter-finalists will be published on Amazon.com – as soon as I know where I’ll post about this. Meanwhile the two review comments by (anonymous) ABNA expert reviewers have appeared. Here are some highlights…

  • We learn so much about the life and work of Makty. I found it very interesting…
  • Elegantly written and full of rich back story about Makty and how he’s fashioned his current existence…
  • On a line level, this is one of the strongest pitches I have read…

The full review comments follow… at this stage the reviewers were only exposed to the “Excerpt”, ie the first 3750 or so words (rather less than the first chapter). At the next stage then (so I understand) the general public gets to see the “Excerpt”, and the reviewers the whole lot.

  1. First reviewer
    • What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt?
      We learn so much about the life and work of Makty. I found it very interesting …not only how he worked at decorating the tombs but also his life style i.e. how he, although he worked hard and was very frugal, still chose to move on to a new location after not staying too long in any one place.
    • What aspect needs the most work?
      Maybe it would have been even more interesting if we had gotten even a hint as to where we were heading and not so much detail of Makty’s painting etc.
    • What is your overall opinion of this excerpt?
      I found it very interesting and, although I would have preferred to have at least of a vague idea of what was coming, I believe it would ultimately turn into a very good story. I also learned some things about tombs it never occurred to me to wonder about.
  2. Second reviewer
    • What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt?
      Elegantly written and full of rich back story about Makty and how he’s fashioned his current existence. The author does a good job of toggling back and forth between past and present action, making us feel as though much more has actually happened in this chapter than actually does. Makty’s strange dream plants just enough of a seed that we can see conflict is on the horizon. His nomadic lifestyle and desire for space and movement also complicate his character, deepening a character otherwise defined by his work. Lots of potential in the the scope and historicity of the work.
    • What aspect needs the most work?
      I mentioned not a lot happens already, but really, not much happens. Outside of the dream, I’m not sure I see a true hook. This is a chapter full of throat clearing and set up. Nothing wrong with that, but the lede is buried under an awful lot of information and description, mostly Makty ruminating, ruminating some more, and then slightly re-calibrating. Without other characters, dialogue, or a shift in scene, I found it hard to stay closely with Makty’s thoughts throughout the chapter. Give this guy something else to ping himself off of, and I think this chapter opens up and breathes a little better.
    • What is your overall opinion of this excerpt?
      On a line level, this is one of the strongest pitches I have read. This author has a sense of what he’s doing, even if I’m not as engrossed by the writing as I could be. I worry about audience with this piece. Who is the market? Is it for people who value character driven stories or historical fiction? A modern novel or more fabelistic? Movement and the journey the author promises in the pitch will be key. ACTION will be key. This excerpt is certainly well crafted enough to demand further attention, especially given its superior style.

Schematic map - the area around Waset (modern Luxor)

Three geeky review snippets

Well, three snippets for today. Full reviews will follow on Amazon etc but I am a bit short of time today.

Cover image - The End of the Bronze Age
First up is Robert Drews’ The End of the Bronze Age which of course I have blogged about a couple of times before. I have now finished this so it’s time to draw it together. Basically my feeling is that Drews makes a good case for his principal point, which is that the collapse of almost all of the major Late Bronze civilisations around 1200BCE (which Drews simply calls The Catastrophe) was primarily the result of changes in military technology and tactics. Not everyone will agree with this, and Drews is happy to acknowledge that factors such as climate change, drought, migration, natural disasters such as earthquakes, and so on contributed to the collapse in particular locations. However, his most persuasive point is that these factors cannot have affected the whole of the eastern Mediterranean at the same time, and also that the great Late Bronze empires had faced these challenges before and overcome them.

His military explanation is built around an exploration of methods of warfare before and after 1200. Before, major powers (even minor city states) fought battles using elite bow-armed chariotry, supported by youths (called ‘runners’ in several traditions) who looked after their own and finished off the fallen enemy. Massed infantry formations did not exist as an active force, only as static defenders, and cavalry were used for scouting and pursuit rather than fighting. After the Catastrophe, infantry ruled the battlefield, having worked out how to neutralise the effect of the chariot arm. Weapons changed accordingly, with new designs of swords and javelins sweeping around the Mediterranean within a decade or two.

I am sure the debate will continue for some time to come, since solid textual and archaeological information is scarce around this era, but Drews has, in my view, put forward a compelling argument here.

Cover image - Anglo-Saxon Runes
Second up is a book which I purchased at Sutton Hoo a few week ago, Anglo-Saxon Runes, by John Kemble. This is actually a very old book, dating from 1840 but given a make-over and some editorial notes by Bill Griffiths in the 1990s with several reprints since. For me, reading this has more to do with historical interest since it is not an especially good source book for learning runes. It does, however, have some fascinating glimpses into the 19th century pursuit of language as well as a review of the major runic inscriptions available in his day.

Kemble was amply fitted for this study, having produced the first modern English version of Beowulf as well as a six-volume critical edition of various Anglo-Saxon documents and other similar stuff. His personality comes over very strongly in his writing – combative, passionate, and determined to get a wider knowledge of Anglo-Saxon runes into the general consciousness. It is clear from Griffiths’ notes that the better part of two centuries of research has altered some of Kemble’s conclusions, but a remarkable part of his work seems to have survived the passage of time. Tolkein fans will recognise some of the words that he re-energised for modern use from their Anglo-Saxon roots.

Bede Ecclesiastical History - cover image
Finally (and strictly speaking still in progress) is The Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a purchase inspired by my recent visit to the Vikings exhibition at the British Museum. I have wanted to read Bede for a considerable time and never got around to him, so now is my chance. It is clear even from a casual encounter that Bede writes as a historian in the same way that Luke does in the biblical book of Acts – both are keen observers of events but are more interested in their moral and spiritual implications than in a simple factual retelling. Some modern readers are put off by this, but it goes with the territory. Bede wanted to record what he saw as the pivotal events in English history up to his time (around 730 CE), and he understood ‘pivotal’ to mean those things which either advanced or thwarted the spread of the Christian gospel. A secondary interest was how royal morality or its opposite affected the life of the nation.

It is clear that Bede was selective in his sources, and aware only of some aspects of the life of the nation. He was diligent in finding sources, but not exhaustive. His geographical location in Northumbria rather limited the extent to which he could find out about events in the south. Other written or material information is now available to us for comparative purposes, so that a more rounded picture can be built up, but Bede remains a hugely important commentator on national religious life of that age. Great stuff.

Drews and the 1200BCE Catastrophe continued

Rather over a month ago I wrote about my first impressions of Robert Drews’ book The End of the Bronze Age, concerning the catastrophe that swept around the eastern Mediterranean civilisations around 1200BCE. Since then I have been working my way slowly through the book and have now almost finished.

Outline map of city destructions c.1200BCE
Drews set out to show that the underlying reason for the collapse of these various city states and regional empires was military, in contrast to other theories such as climate change, famine, drought mass migration etc. He recognises that any or all of these might be contributing factors, but makes the basic case that they had all been experienced beforehand without leading to this kind of large-scale collapse. What, he asks, made this episode so qualitatively different from the others?

After reviewing various theories he describes what we know of military actions in Late Bronze (roughly 1550 to 1150 or so) – and the surprising answer is “not a great deal“. It is easy for those of us who know the huge reliefs commissioned by Ramesses II of his Qadesh battle to be misled into thinking that we are overflowing with pictorial information… but this is not the case.

So Drews reconstructs the battlefield from a mixture of text, picture and archaeology, the latter including analysis of the causes of battlefield death. The picture he builds is that Late Bronze battles between established states were very much set-piece affairs, dominated by chariot action. From the Greek city-states round the eastern Mediterranean and the Fertile Crescent to northern India we find that a light, two-horse and two-man chariot was the norm, in which the second man wielded a bow. Sometimes a third man might ride along to get to the battle, but would routinely dismount once action started. Such infantry as there were served two distinct purposes – static defence of key locations such as a camp, and support ‘runners’ for the chariots to finish off fallen enemies and protect fallen comrades. Unlike later battles, the infantry were not the main event, but a sideline.

According to Drews, this changed within a few decades when groups from the northern Mediterranean (who became known as the Sea Peoples and entered the text of the Hebrew Bible as Philistines) mastered two new methods of waging war: firstly they armed themselves with javelins and long swords, and secondly they took the infantry battle to the chariots. For a few decades they were unstoppable – horse and rider were suddenly vulnerable in ways they had not been before, and battle after battle was lost outside the gates of city after city until someone worked out that the game had changed.

That someone was Ramesses III (or at least one of his generals) who took the attackers on at their own game with a determined infantry defence and managed to stall the seemingly relentless advance. He fought them to a standstill in the Levant and compromised by granting them land in a series of towns along the coastline. But the social change that had begun could not be halted. Chariotry was not just a way to wage war – for the previous few centuries it had been the domain of the elite. Maintaining a chariot arm was expensive in land, time, food, equipment, and cost, and although chariots remained in use as a prestige conveyance, the time of their military dominance was gone. So to was the position of social dominance that the charioteer used to hold.

You can be sure that these insights will find their way into my fictional writing, in particular in the work-in-progress which now has a provisional title – The Flame Before Us.

Review – No Man’s Land

No Man’s Land, by Nilesh Shrivastava, was a book I bought as part of a long-term plan to get to know Indian authors and writing. So unlike many of my choices it is set pretty much in the present day – the main action occurs in the late 1990s, with some flashback events set about twenty years earlier than that. Not everyone will like this book: it deals with the inter-personal relationships and conflicts in a small family rather than having grand political or military scope.

Buy No Man’s Land from Amazon.co.uk
Buy No Man’s Land from Amazon.com

The crux of the story is a stretch of land between Delhi and one of the new technology cities which have sprung up nearby (Gurgaon, to the south-west). The land has traditionally been farmed and can provide an adequate though not lavish income: with the explosive demand for building work it now has the potential to be worth a considerable fortune. As such, it becomes the focus of a family feud.

Cover image - No Man's LandNow, it is clear from occasional comments in the book that the plot draws from traditional Indian literature, in particular the Mahabharata. My knowledge of this is quite scanty, but fortunately I was able to get some pointers from Indian friends. I suspect that a greater familiarity with both the history and myth of India would open up other dimensions of this book which remained largely opaque to me. Even without that, though, there is enough here of humanity’s common sources of comfort and conflict that the story hangs together well.

For me, this was a four star book. I would have liked there to be more times when Nilesh’s obvious skills of lyrical writing came to the fore. One character, Shashwat, a family advisor and confidant, is well placed to offer words at a deeper level, but all too rarely does so. I found myself longing for more times when he was given the opportunity to speak. However, like the others he is to a great degree caught up in his particular fate – this is part of the tragedy of the situation that each character tries without real success to surmount.

This book worked for me in part because I am strongly motivated to read about north India, and especially the area around Delhi. I do feel that it would have been more powerful if the deeper background such as that of the Mahabharata had been brought into sharper focus. That would not only have satisfied my regular desire for historical fiction, but would also moved the characters onto a wider stage than they reached in No Man’s Land. All in all a good read, but one which could have done more with the material to hand.

Writing, both historical and speculative