Hild

First, this is a book about a girl. It's true that she's an historical personality who ends up being one of the most significant women of the early Middle Ages (some might call it the dark ages). The kind of woman that feminists have rightly pointed out have been under recognised by history. She was certainly very much recognised in her day. So, secondly, this is the seventh century England with warring British kingdoms (and their kings, advisers and religions) struggling for supremacy. So why did I find the fictionalised story of a seventh century girl utterly fascinating and rip-a-long read?Nicola Griffith has created the portrait of a thoroughly admirable genius. It is really not so easy to create a portrait of a genius that is compelling and utterly convincing. After all geniuses are by definition somewhat exceptional. But here we have one, and the nature of her genius is to be able to read the patterns of the world, the living ecosystems of nature, Society, politics, human affairs, and indeed there collective interactions.Hild as a baby girl is set up by her mother to be the seer to the King, because her mother sees this as the only way to give her a voice in society and a certain protection over her own options in life (at a time when Noble women lived in the separated world of womenfolk and were married off for political purposes as peacemakers). In order to remain the seer she has to perform, solving problems, eliminating surprises, forecasting events from the kind of harvest to the action of other kings. The King expects her to have magic powers, wyrd, and we grow to sense that at times she really does, but these "magic powers" primarily derive from her genius at seeing the patterns in nature, Society and human affairs (as well as being a brilliant designer of woven cloth, which we discover took something like 70% of the time of women in court). She observes patterns and weaves interventions that change the patterns of life around her. What I found fascinating about this is that a seventh century fictional character can give us an insight into understanding how we need to navigate our understanding of the "complex world – complexity" that science has turned onto. The old sort of science saw the world is like a bicycle or a jigsaw. Something you could disassemble or assemble out of independent parts and in doing so no harm would come to the bicycle or jigsaw. But now we know the world is really more like a frog. If you disassemble a frog you can't reassemble it.At no point does Nicola Griffith fall into the anachronism of reflecting on modern science and for all I know she has no expertise in it. Indeed the book is evocative, imaginative and beautifully written. She's a great stylist. Instead, I think like many of the most advanced artists of our day and indeed for centuries she knows these truths from her own creative sources. Hild is a profound practical creative ecological scientist. She is also deeply likeable, sexy, human and as we follow her journey from childhood into teen years and (I won't spoil the story), we follow her ups and downs, the pains, fears and triumphs.In the process we also get to know with brilliant intimacy about one of the (in some ways tragic) turning points in European history. It's a moment few people will know about, but in her lifetime (and she was intimately involved as this story shows) pagan worship of Woden (more or less) comes to an end and Celtic Christianity becomes replaced with Roman Christianity. In the process human beings lost touch with something magical yet natural in the world that both paganism and Celtic Christianity celebrated. They lost the sense of nature as something beautiful, sacred, connected, and as the root and soil of healthy human life. Hild gets it. And I believe that we won't solve the environmental problems of today until more people become like Hild.

So why is this the novel of at least the decade and probably one of the best historical novels ever written? The research is meticulous and one of the century's best science fiction and fantasy writers has flawlessly evoked the "warp and weft" of a world only causally linked to our own. The writing is lovely with assaults on the senses through colour and sound and smell with similes evoking saga and song as well as a lost and precise daily routine. But beautiful writing and meticulous research aren't new, though they are hugely welcome. The characterisation is masterly, with a cast of wholly convincing and engrossing minor characters, especially the vain and subtle king Edwin, carving out power forever with the help of a convenient Christ and a child seer. Admirers of Griffith's Aud novels may recognise Aud's Mor dimly in Breguswith, another distantly affectionate and politically astute maternal figure whose love is shown in machinations rather than embraces. Aud also lends something of herself to Hild, another impossibly tall fighter with a disconnect between her head and her emotions. But Hild is more than a fantasy figure or author's alter ego. She captures from the moment she rejects suggestions of babyhood- "She frowned. She was three. She had her own shoes" -and her adolescence as seer and warrior and emotional outsider is brilliantly charted until the deceptive optimism of the final scene. The end seems shockingly sentimental at first but contains a bleak inevitability of loss and betrayal which the next book promises to disentangle.But all this- fine research, superb writing, a gripping, twisting plot and pitch perfect characterisation - are not the only reasons to read this book. The best reason is that nowhere else will an author show us from the vantage point of the twenty first century what it was really like to think in the seventh. Judeo Christian morality is suspended in favour of a code of loyalty shot through with pragmatism in a world where sin has no meaning, while religions vie for power with the forces of nature and of politics for power. The violence is harsh and necessary, with no "blue place" to soften its corrosiveness, and the authorial honesty is extraordinary. Putting it down is like coming up to breathe in sanitized safety and discovering that the air is murkier here and complex modern men and women are smaller than their forbears. Buy it, read or listen to it - and then read it again. It needs to be on every bookshelf that already contains Renault, White and Sutcliff, and the next book - please let it be a trilogy- can't come too quickly.