Kingdom of Shadows, by Barbara Erskine. Book review

First published 1988. Edition reviewed, Harper 2009, ISBN 978-0-00-728866-3. 715 pages

Kingdom of Shadows is a time-slip novel set in Scotland and England with two intertwined plots, one set in about 1290 to 1314, one set in the 1980s. The historical plot centres on Robert Bruce and Isobel MacDuff, Countess of Buchan, with other historical figures including Isobel’s husband the Earl of Buchan and Robert’s queen Elizabeth de Burgh featuring as secondary characters.  All the characters in the modern plot are fictional.

In 1980s Britain, Clare Royland inherits Duncairn Castle, a (fictional) romantic ruin on the north-east coast of Scotland, from her beloved aunt Margaret Gordon. The castle has been in the Gordon family for over seven hundred years and Clare, like her aunt, feels a powerful connection to Duncairn and to its earlier owner, Isobel Countess of Buchan, a family ancestor who played a tragic role in the Scottish Wars of Independence. But Clare’s husband Paul, a ruthless and distinctly dodgy financier in the City of London, sees Duncairn first as a nuisance and then, when an American oil company bids to buy the land, as a potential solution to his secret financial problems.  When Clare refuses the American oil company’s offer, Paul tries to make her sell Duncairn, by persuasion, fraud and force.  Meanwhile, Neil Forbes, a Scottish environmental campaigner, is organising a campaign to oppose both the sale of Duncairn and drilling for oil.  He and Clare are on the same side, but for different reasons, and Neil initially regards Clare as an enemy.  As the pressure on her builds, Clare experiences increasingly vivid visions of Isobel’s life, as though Isobel can somehow call to her from the distant past.  Is Isobel’s tragedy about to repeat itself through Clare?

I first read Kingdom of Shadows years ago.  I was reminded of it more recently when I read The Lion Wakes, because both novels feature Isobel MacDuff, Countess of Buchan, as a major character and involve a (probably fictional*) love affair between her and Robert Bruce, though that’s about the only similarity between them.  Kingdom of Shadows is a full-blown (and, at over 700 pages, ‘full’ is the operative word) Gothic romance, packed with menace, drama, passionate love and equally passionate hatred, with vaguely supernatural forces looming in the background.  The first time I read it, I remember finding the supernatural aspects irritating, so much so that I ended up skimming through quite a lot of the novel.  This time I treated it as a fantasy novel creating a world of its own that happens to have some similarities with late twentieth-century and early fourteenth-century Britain, and that worked much better for me. 

Isobel (Isabel, Isabella) MacDuff’s story, what little of it is recorded in history, is itself the stuff of tragic romance.  She was a member of the MacDuff family of Fife, who had the hereditary right to crown Scottish monarchs.  Although her husband John Comyn, Earl of Buchan, was a senior member of the Comyn family, enemies and political rivals of the Bruce family, Isobel crowned Robert Bruce when he seized the Scottish throne in 1306.  This conferred some traditional legitimacy on Robert’s rather hurried coronation, which may lie behind the harshness of the punishment later inflicted on Isobel by Edward I of England.  (I’m trying to avoid too many spoilers for readers who are not familiar with the history, so I won’t spell out what happened to her here; anyone who wants to find out can look it up on Wikipedia).  

The modern plot in Kingdom of Shadows has to go into overdrive to live up to the dramatic events of Isobel’s true story.  It reminded me of a rather over-the-top Eighties TV drama series, with its ostentatious wealth, corporate double-dealing, insider trading, fraud, blackmail, family secrets, deceit, abduction, suicide and attempted murder.  I gave up trying to keep track of all the double-crossing and fraud, and also got rather lost among Paul Royland’s collection of rich and mostly rather unappealing relatives and City colleagues.  If the financial wheeler-dealing background to Clare’s tale is intended as a sort of modern analogy to the turbulent power politics in fourteenth-century Scotland that form the background to Isobel’s tale, it has the appropriate level of dizzying complexity.

On this re-read, I was struck by the degree of allegory between Clare’s storyline and Isobel’s.  Not just in the broad parallels between the situations of the two women – controlling husbands, a love triangle, the need to make a stand – but also in details.  Sometimes the effect is quite powerful, as in their shared experience of imprisonment.  At other times I found the allegory a bit heavy-handed for my taste.  For example, both women are subjected to religious rituals by clerical brothers-in-law; and in the historical plot Robert Bruce has an Irish wife, Elizabeth de Burgh daughter of the Earl of Ulster, so the romantic hero of the modern plot, environmentalist Neil Forbes, is duly given an Irish girlfriend. I wonder if Clare’s passivity, which was another feature that irritated me first time round, was also there in the interests of creating parallels between her situation and Isobel’s. Isobel lived in a time when women, even wealthy high-born women, had very few rights. Clare has lived a very sheltered life, a beautiful rich girl who married straight from school, has always been dependent either on her parents or her husband and has never had to take her own decisions, and so she is easily pushed around by other people. Similarly, the unpleasant portrayal of Isobel’s husband may owe more to allegory with Clare’s abusive husband in the modern storyline than to the historical John Comyn.  The historical Isobel clearly disagreed politically with her husband on at least the matter of Robert Bruce’s coronation, but as far as I know nothing is known of their personal relationship except that the marriage had no surviving children, which could be interpreted in many different ways.  

The writing style is heavy on detail – I didn’t feel I really needed a description of Clare’s outfit almost every time she makes an appearance – and some of the descriptions of Clare’s nightmares and visions of Isobel border on the repetitive. The pace picks up in the last 200 pages or so as the various sub-plots involving Clare’s friends and relatives either fall by the wayside or converge on the main plot.  Atmosphere and landscape are conveyed well, especially at Duncairn with its mystical connection to both women.

A useful map at the front of the book shows the major locations in the tale, including the fictional Duncairn, and a very brief Historical Note outlines Isobel’s known history.

Gothic time-slip romance based on the tragic history of Isobel MacDuff, Countess of Buchan, during the Scottish Wars of Independence, interwoven with and paralleled by a tale about her fictional descendant Clare Royland in 1980s Britain.

*’Probably’ fictional because although there were allegations of an affair between Isobel and Robert Bruce in hostile contemporary chronicles, these may have been no more than inventions by political enemies.

The Boy With Two Heads, by JM Newsome. Book review

Trifolium Books UK, 2012. ISBN 978-0-9568104-4-1. 364 pages. Also available as an e-book. 

Disclaimer: Trifolium Books UK also publish my novel, Paths of Exile. They didn’t ask me to review The Boy With Two Heads, and although I heard of The Boy With Two Heads through them, I don’t think that has affected my opinion.

The Boy With Two Heads is a time-slip novel for young adults, set in ancient Greece in 432 BC and modern Athens and Cumbria (northern England) in 2010. Phidias, master sculptor, architect and engineer, and his brother Panainos, master painter, are historical figures who play important roles in the historical storyline. The main character in the historical storyline, Themis, a young athlete competing in the ancient Olympic Games, is fictional, as are all the characters in the modern storyline. 

In 432 BC, Themistocles (Themis), a twelve-year-old boy living in Athens, is training to compete in the boxing at the Olympic Games to be held later that year, when an accident leaves him unconscious with a serious head injury. In 2010 AD, Suzanne is a fourteen-year-old girl on a school trip to Athens, with athletic ambitions of her own. A road accident on exactly the same spot as Themis’ accident 2,400 years earlier leaves Suzanne in a coma. Somehow her spirit is drawn back through time to keep Themis alive. With the ‘wrong’ spirit inhabiting his body, Themis has no memory of anything before his accident and has to learn about his life all over again, with occasional bewildering glimpses into 21st-century medical technology. Suzanne, unconscious most of the time, sees glimpses of Themis’ life in visions. Gradually, it becomes apparent that Themis is the target of a mysterious plot against his life. Will he survive to compete at the Olympics?  And will Suzanne’s spirit be released back to her, or will she remain trapped in the past for ever? 

As regular readers may know, I am not well attuned to time-slip novels.  I almost always find that I get interested in one storyline, usually the historical one, at the expense of the other (for example, in The House on the Strand, reviewed here earlier).  Unusually, in The Boy With Two Heads I found the modern storyline as intriguing as the historical one.  I read the book twice, and although I picked up some links and cross-references between the two storylines second time round, I still found myself reading it as two separate narratives. Which is not how time-slip novels are meant to be read, so bear in mind that I won’t have appreciated the time-slip aspect of the novel.

The modern storyline has a powerful sense of suspense – will Suzanne make a recovery?  It brilliantly captures the sudden disorienting shock of a serious accident in a city far from home, and the anxiety and fear felt by Suzanne’s friends and family. The author also makes very effective use of modern communication tools such as blogs and Facebook – second nature to modern teenagers – to tell the modern story from several viewpoints, in an ingenious variation on the epistolary novel. 

The historical storyline forms a larger share of the novel than the modern storyline. It is excellent on historical detail, especially as Themis has lost his memory and has to learn about his life and world all over again, so the reader gets to learn it with him. Anyone looking for a painless way to gain a detailed picture of classical Greek housing, food, clothing, travel, athletic training, religion, bronze casting, and the immensely intricate engineering and artistry that went into creating a giant statue of Zeus with ivory skin, gilded robes and glowing eyes, will love this book.  Not to mention the description of the ancient Olympic Games, with the athletes’ oath, the opening and closing ceremonies, the vast tent city housing the competitors, trainers, spectators and hangers-on, and the athletic competitions themselves, culminating in Themis’ boxing bout.

The pace is steady, and I found less of a sense of suspense in the historical storyline than the modern one, because it was not initially clear to me that there was more at stake than Themis getting his memory back.  Having lost his memory, Themis is not aware that he has qualified to compete in the Olympics, and I did not pick up on the seriousness of the plot against him until well into the novel. 

Characterisation is lively, especially that of the cheerful, rotund and rather irreverent Panainos. There are some neat parallels between young people’s issues and dilemmas in the two storylines – some things don’t change much in 2,400 years.  I have a suspicion that Ancient Greece was probably nastier than its portrayal here, but there are limits on what can reasonably be put into a young adult novel, and in any case an athlete from a prosperous family was probably more sheltered than most.

A list of characters is useful for keeping track of the cast, especially minor figures, and a glossary explains the Greek terms used in the text. Both of these are at the back, so it is worth bookmarking them for easy reference.  There is a map of Athens at the front, and maps of ancient Olympia and the sailing route to it at the back, all useful for following the characters’ movements. A brief Author’s Note outlines some of the historical background, and there is more information on the author’s blog.

Time-slip novel for young adults set at the Olympic Games in ancient Greece in 432 BC and in modern Britain.

The Boy with Two Heads, by Julia Newsome

Trifolium Books UK, publishers of Kathleen Herbert's fourth novel Moon In Leo (reviewed here) and my own Paths of Exile, have now published a third title.

The Boy With Two Heads, by Julia Newsome (ISBN: 978-0-8568104-4-1), is a time-slip young adult novel about the ancient Olympics in Classical Greece.

Here's the cover copy:

It all starts in Athens.
In 432 BC, they think Themis is dead. Suzanne, who is on a school trip in 2010, is drawn through thousands of years to keep him alive. Will Themis’ destiny be death or glory in the Games of the 87th Olympiad? Will Suzanne regain control of her life, or will her mind be occupied forever by the past, while her body lies in hospital in present-day Cumbria?


“This book transported me effortlessly back to ancient Greece, vividly evoking its sights, sounds and even smells. And I found that young people’s issues have hardly changed in 2,400 years!”
Marion Clarke, fiction editor

“A wonderful story which brings the ancient Olympics to vibrant life and links them to contemporary young people. You can almost smell Greece, and there is a lovely equivalence of teenage feelings and humour, then and now. I couldn’t put it down and didn’t realize how much I had learnt until after the enthralling climax.”
Philippa Harrison, former Managing Director of Macmillan and Little Brown UK

More information on the Trifolium Books blog. Available to order now from bookshops (including Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk), or direct from the publisher (contact details via the Trifolium website, here).

I think an e-book version is planned in due course.

More about the book and the author on the author's blog, here.