![]() There are details of the narrative that seem to be there only because Griffith wanted to include something interesting she had learned about the early medieval period, and every one of these jostles our belief in the world she has constructed.īut this is the kind of novel you read in a few sittings or on the subway, glad to follow the meandering plot from battle to battle, intrigue to intrigue, barely keeping track of the shifting alliances and Old English names, all of it sweeping the merciful and shrewd Hild toward her exalted calling. ![]() To make sure we don't miss the point, Griffith has Fursey reveal his ignorance of sedimentation and the tremendous age of the earth: "It must have been a cataclysmic event: such a beast hurling itself into solid rock." The past on the page is a fragile reality, and the more distant the more fragile. ![]() ![]() The sole purpose of the exchange, as with certain scenes in the first season of "Mad Men," is to make the reader feel smug for understanding something the characters do not and could not: in this case, that Fursey has stumbled upon a fossilized dinosaur. There is a clumsy scene in which the Irish priest Fursey tells Hild of a dragon's skeleton he saw embedded in a cliff. Griffith does not always seem to understand how deadly cheap authorial irony is to historical fiction. ![]()
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