THIS monumental novel is an earnest saga of rape, pillage, war and ecclesiastical politics in Connaught, the British Kingdom of Rheged (up by the Solway Firth) and Northumbria, a Teutonic bridgehead, in the 7th century. Most of Europe, then as now, was barbarously materialistic, while only Celtic men of good faith kept alight the flame of saintliness and scholarship.
Within that framework, which Bragg began constructing in 1958, his first year of reading history at Oxford, the novel - sorry, epic - is a triangular love story. It involves Bega (pronounced Beega), an Irish princess of strong character and high ideals, her tutor, Patric, a handsome Christian warrior Prince of Rheged, who, in her youth, is on loan from Britain, and God.
God wins.
To reveal the outcome in this way cannot harmfully reduce the narrative's suspense, because there is very little of that, unless, possibly, one has forgotten the schism of the Celtic and Roman churches that resulted from the Synod of Whitby in the year AD 664. Bragg presents impassioned antagonistic speeches in a lengthy argument about fixing the date of Easter.
He is evidently concerned more with depicting a pageant of 7th century Christianity than with telling the fictionalised historic life stories of individual 7th century Christians. However, the biographies serve to give History a sense of human meaning.
Time and time and time again, Bega fretfully acknowledges that she yearns to marry Patric and settle down with him in philoprogenitive bliss. But she repeatedly, and rather tediously, keeps reminding herself that earthly bliss is all very well for ordinary folk, but she loves God more than Patric, and feels that He would not like her to have children. This God is jealous and demanding and approves of violence and suffering on any scale as long as they are inflicted for His sake.
Throughout Bega's deliberately arduous life of praying, fasting and, when necessary, swinging a deadly sword, she seems to feel that denying herself the possible satisfaction of connubiality is doing God a big favour. Bragg suggests that self denial, especially if the resulting frustration causes sincere unhappiness, is the way to sainthood.
Patric also is torn between his love of Bega and his love of God. There is one lapse from chastity, in a cave where Patric and Bega are taking shelter. But on that occasion she is not a well woman - flu perhaps fever, delirium. She does not know what they are doing. For a long time after that incident, she thinks she is a virgin, until he tells her what happened. In these unusual circumstances, the deflowering, from her and God's point of view, is a mere technicality that doesn't count.
Deprived of Bega's love, Patric sublimates his energies in warfare. After small but significant guerrilla skirmishes against the forces of Ecfrith, the ambitious, cruel King of the Northumbrians, Patric and his doughty followers confront King Ecfrith's numerically superior army in a climactic battle to keep Britain British. Patric is cunning as well as brave. Bragg recounts with gusto the story of the Battle of Nechtansmere, literature's most stirring triumph of righteous indignation since the recapture of Toad Hall.
Bragg undertakes to create a tarranging gamut of effects, from visionary miracles to the squalor of petty rival fiefdoms. Such extremes of behaviour and mood call for literary virtuosity. Bragg writes best when he writes most simply. When he strives for original excellence there are fallings short. For example, he writes: "She writhed on the bed as scalding prickle backed serpents thrashed furiously inside her poor belly", meaning she was hungry. He occasionally attains the pseudo solemnity of ersatz archaic diction: Bishop Colman "knew certain sure that a holiness was there". Occasionally he slips, as on a banana peel, into bathos: "Her breath, they said, the sweetest in all Northumbria.
Though many readers would probably disagree I felt that the whole book required rigorous editing that it never got. But there are punters who may feel they are on to a good thing: 757 pages at £16.99 works out at 44.56 pages per pound, a bargain in publishing's new Dark Ages.