There is one last nightingale... the very last bird left on that wall. The rest of the plaster has cracked and fallen away... It is all going down into the dark earth, Isla thinks, remembering what Crowther had said about the marsh rising and the cities falling. It's going to take them all with it. But it hasn't taken the nightingale. Not yet. [loc. 3249]
Isla and Blue live on a nameless island in the Thames. The year is AD500 or thereabouts; the Romans ('Sun Kings') have abandoned Britain, and the ruins of their city are rumoured to be haunted. The Saxons ('Seax'), ruled by Osric, live across the river. After the death of the girls' mother, Osric exiled Isla and Blue along with their father, a Great Smith. Ostensibly this was because the smith had brought bad spirits to the camp, but clearly the reason was that he was the only man in the south of England who could make 'firetongued' (pattern-welded) swords, and Osric wanted those for himself.
But now their father is dead; Isla is terrified that Osric's soldiers will discover that she's been working in the forge, an activity prohibited to women; and without the protection of Osric and his sons, the sisters will have no home and no kin. Blue's tales of witchcraft, however, don't endear them to the superstitious Seax, and it doesn't help that the sisters are half-Iceni (through their dead mother) and wholly 'other': Blue's pet crow, Isla's mismatched eyes ...
The characters of the novel inhabit a world infested with ghosts, spirits and deities (Blue occasionally slips off to the mudflats to commune with the staked skeleton of a woman) but Dark Earth is emphatically not a fantasy novel. Every event is explicable, actual, real: it's the overlay of the characters' beliefs and perceptions (and sometimes a deliberate desire to mystify) that adds the sheen of the fantastic. Dark Earth -- the name refers to the layer of dark soil marking the years of Londinium's abandonment -- is firmly rooted in the archaeology of post-Roman London, and especially the Billingsgate Bathhouse, where the sisters encounter a predominantly female community of outcasts, scavengers and mystics. There are some beautifully evocative depictions of life in the ruins, and the need to reuse and repurpose everything that's been left behind by the vanished Sun Kings. Cremation urns become cook-pots; nails are salvaged for metalwork, now that the Roman mines have fallen into disuse; overgrown gardens still harbour medicinal herbs.
The narrative voice is Isla's, and it's clear that she doesn't understand everything she sees. She is oblivious to the growing attraction between Blue and dark-skinned Caius; uncertain about her own feelings for Senna, who rescues them from the splintering Roman bridge; convinced that she has brought a curse upon the people who have helped her. But her emotions are vivid and compehensible, despite the strangeness of the post-apocalyptic world through which she moves.
I'm a Londoner, a medievalist and a feminist, and I enjoyed this novel a great deal. It's a tale of contrasts: Romans and Saxons, men ('all swords and certainties') and women, stone and wood, ghosts and the living, pagan gods and Christianity. There were, however, two scenes which jolted me out of the story -- an account of folk banding together to save a stranded whale (what, and lose out on all that meat?!) and a passage referencing Macbeth, in which the author would have done better to paraphrase more. Nevertheless, an engaging read, with credible diversity, and a fascinating and credible depiction of a distant, poorly-documented time.
Stott's website has a page linking to some fascinating posts about her research rabbitholes.
Thanks to NetGalley for a free copy of this novel, in exchange for this honest review.
Fulfils the 'featuring an author's note' rubric of the 52 books in 2022 challenge.
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