here have been rumours about this book for years. The rumours--at any rate the ones I've heard--are true. Mary Gentle's new novel, as rumoured, is absolutely immense, well over a thousand densely packed pages, something like 650,000 words. And, as rumoured, the final tale justifies almost every single word Mary Gentle used, over several years of work, to tell it.
The publishing history of Ash, which is a bit complicated, needs to be explained. Gentle's British publisher, Victor Gollancz, had half the text in hand a few years ago, and issued (but did not release) bound galleys of that first half in 1998; the firm then decided to go for broke, and to await delivery of the entire novel, which they have now published in one volume. They were right to do so.
Ash's American publishers, Avon Eos, on the other hand, decided to treat the text as a closely linked series, and are now in the middle of releasing it as four separate 420-page mass market paperbacks under the overall title The Book of Ash. A Secret History came out last year; Carthage Ascendant has just been published; The Wild Machines and Lost Burgundy are due later this year. It is a decision which saves elbow pain, as the Gollancz edition is so heavy it hurts to hold it up to read; but American readers should not be fooled. Ash is not a series of four linked novels. It is one story.
Indeed, of all the very long novels this reviewer felt warranted their length--a list which includes John Crowley's not yet complete AEgypt; Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever; Michael Moorcock's Pyat (also incomplete); Dan Simmons's Hyperion Cantos; Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon; J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings; Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun; Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia--Ash: A Secret History is by far the most compact (though certainly not the shortest) and the most intense.
Reading it is a bit like going on a tsunami ride.
It might be simplest to put aside for a moment, but not for good, the contemporary narrative which frames the main story, and which seems a bit inconsequential for the first half of the book, a little behind the actual flow of revelation. We can begin instead with the prologue, set somewhere in central France, in a mercenary camp around 1465. A parentless girl named Ash (from the colour of her hair) is raped by two soldiers, kills them, later follows her captain to a woodland shrine where the Green Christ is worshipped, hears the voice of the lion in her head, survives. We are ready.
Tough, sidewinder-fast heroine
We jump ahead a decade, to the summer of 1476, and the ride begins in earnest. At the age of 20, Ash (like Joan of Arc half a century earlier) has become a warrior-captain. She is extremely good at managing men, as the story demonstrates in a dozen ways; and gets even better as the months pass. She is tough, foul-mouthed, humorous, sidewinder-fast with a weapon. (Gentle knows exactly how weapons work and armour fits and how everything chafes; more vividly than I have ever experienced, Ash conveys the grit, and horror, and exhilaration of what it might feel to bear arms, either as a swashbuckler or a grunt, or both; the chaos, the information overload, the speed of what reads like genuine combat have never before, I think, been as ruthlessly captured in a book purporting--but wait for it--to be a fantasy.) For all these reasons, and because the voice of the Lion continues to give her tactical battle advice, Ash's control over the 800 men in her mercenary company never seems more than slightly implausible.
Ash and her company are employed by Emperor Frederick of the German lands; she is too successful in a scrimmage, almost (embarrassingly) capturing the duke of Burgundy, who is in dispute with Frederick. As punishment disguised as reward, the emperor weds her to one of his land-holding knights, thus (under medieval law) depriving her of her company, her captaincy, her role in life. Unfortunately, she is sexually attracted to her new husband, who despises her for complicated reasons.
Under his command, her company escorts the disgraced Visigoth ambassadors to Frederick (minus their stone golem, which has been destroyed) back towards the Mediterranean, so they can return to Carthage, where Eternal Twilight rules, and warn the king-caliph against attempting to conquer Europe.
What?
The floor gives beneath us
It is at this point, or maybe a few slam-bang pages earlier, that we begin to realize that Ash--despite its publishers' claim--is not in fact a fantasy at all, but some sort of unfolding alternate history, and the floor gives beneath us. We begin to be haunted by resonances, seismic shudderings deep in the text. We realize (soon, we are told explicitly) that the voice Ash hears is what in fact it sounds like: a tactical computer. We realize that the golems we have met are robots, that the Eternal Twilight is real and explainable. As John Crowley says in Aegypt, "There is more than one history of the world"; and Ash begins more and more to read as though something precarious but vital were happening to the story of the world itself, as we read: as in (say) "Tlon, Uqbar, Tertius Orbis," by Jorge Luis Borges; or maybe in "The Late Repentance of Horemheb" by H.S. Wiesner and Ioan Culianu (the Chicago academic who specialized in Hermetic philosophy, and who was murdered in 1991), where true archeological finds surface to confirm hoaxes and destabilize reality; or maybe in Crowley himself. What is real in Ash's history, and what is real in our own, begin to jostle for position beneath our feet, within our bones, as we read. We begin to feel vertigo.
The "surface" story sweeps on, unstoppable, unrelenting, tidal. By January 1477, Ash will be dead as far as the world whose history she defends is concerned. (It will take Ash 600,000 words to reach this point.) Ash and her company's escort duties are ended when they run across a Visigoth army razing Genoa; they escape, return to the north; hire out to the duke of Burgundy, whose army meets the Visigoths and is decimated.
Meanwhile Ash has come face to face with the Visigoth commander--who is her twin. They have been bred, over centuries of experiments, to hear the golem. Ash is captured and taken to slavery in Carthage, where the computer resides deep underground, and where she miscarries (her husband had spent one night with her) and escapes.
Longing for the dark
She attempts to destroy the golem head (once Roger Bacon's), but discovers that, far beneath that voice in her head, deeper and more terrible voices can be heard uttering anathema against the world, crying out that Burgundy must be destroyed, savagely expressing their longing for a continuation of the dark (caused by their use of the sun's energy), for the termination of all life on Earth. They are called the Wild Machines. After 10,000 years of listening to Homo sapiens, they have now determined that our species must end.
Ash escapes again, with some of her company, which had been sent to raid Carthage. She reaches besieged Dijon, in the heart of Burgundy, where the sun still shines. Her genius becoming more and more incandescent, she manages the defense of the city. Much happens (something happens almost every page) and Ash works out who she is. In the end, Burgundy, in some sense, is saved. The central story ends abruptly.
It is not that simple, of course. Let us return to the frame, which consists (at first) of a short introduction by Pierce Ratcliff, an academic engaged in translating the melange of medieval manuscripts which go together to tell Ash's story; plus an email correspondence between him and his editor, Anna Longman. He has contracted to publish what he calls Ash: The Lost History of Burgundy. Initially, Ratcliff assures Longman that although the manuscript he is forwarding to her in batches may be unorthodox, its weirdnesses are explainable as metaphor or due to mistranslations of corrupt medieval Latin. But here, in the first years of the 21st century, reality soon begins to buckle too, just as it does in 1476.
A joust between versions of history
Ratcliff goes to Tunisia, where another colleague has discovered first the remains of a stone golem, then Carthage itself, in a rift at the bottom of the sea where no rift had been. Eventually, Ratcliff and Longman begin to understand that some long-breathed continuation of a profound drama--a profound joust between versions of history--is surfacing. The world will never be the same. Eventually, they understand the meaning of Burgundy; why it is central to the continuation of human life that the rulers of Burgundy have the power to negate "magic"--in SF terms, the power to conserve a particular reality against the flux of probable states.
Ash is central to this, as we have half understood for hundreds of thousands of words. The last 50 or so pages of Ash show us how, and why, and when. It is not the function of a reviewer to synopsize any further. Enough to say that, after a week of reading, we see, in a flash, a crystal flash which does not blind, just what it is we have been reading.
Very simply, Ash works.
There is much more to talk about: the brilliance of the conversations and debates; the astonishing clamour of combat; the roundedness of almost every character in the vast tale; the sense of continuous argument; the occasional moments when Ash and her gang act as though the world were a game, and all they needed to do was turn off the VR machine to return home, and you almost begin to think none of them is ever going to die (but you are very wrong). And there is Ash herself, whose life is genuinely hard, and who (unlike some of Gentle's earlier heroines) pays dearly, time and again, for what she does to others. She may be something of a Temporal Adventuress, but she pays for it. She pays.
There is more, much more. (Ash is also extremely funny.) But enough for now. Buy the four volumes, or the one. Sit in a corner. Open the book. Hold on.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and other places too numerous to list; much of this material has been collected in Strokes: Reviews and Essays 1966-1986 and Look at the Evidence: Reviews and Essays.
