Tácnbora: Exile and Pagans
This internally inconsistent novel is set in the 6th-century world of Ireland and Scotland. It’s ostensibly about the man who became Saint Columba or, maybe, about proselytizing Christianity, or it may also be about a fictitious man, Finn, who lives both as a Christian monk and a warrior. Much of the first third of the book depicts, then discusses at length, a battle that Columba fought. Then a focus on Finn takes over. Most of the inconsistencies are character-based. Columba counsels understanding but arrives in Pictland and immediately holds a Christian mass at a druidic holy site. When the druids show up, Columba does not apologize for his absolute rudeness but only explains God, whereupon the druids shrug and let him go about his business, despite the desecration they had felt two sentences earlier. Finn is a young man, sub-twenty years of age, but somehow knows, and trains a group of Pictish warriors in, the Roman shield-wall technique, in a kingdom where he has been for not even two months. Where this knowledge came from is unexplained.
The book goes from graphic, well-depicted battle scenes to platitudes about God. The whiplash is extreme. When the portion of the book focuses on Finn, he is an old-fashioned hero—all goodness and light without a whiff of a flaw, and all other characters roll over in favor of his expertise, which is completely unearned. But all the characters are flat, operating only in service of the next battle: for to say there is a plot is misleading. The book becomes a picaresque adventure, without culmination, rising action, or resolution. As a reader, I could not tell you what the point of this novel is. The research is there, undoubtedly, but the mission is missing.
