Ash - A Secret History is by far the longest novel I’ve read. When I saw the thickness of the book, the number of lines on each page and the miniscule size of the font, I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to read through the whole thing.
All it took for me to get over that fear was reading the first few pages. Mary Gentle hooked me with her commitment to telling Ash’s story in a way that only she could and she refused to let go of me until the very end.
That’s because Ash - A Secret History is one thousand one hundred and thirteen pages of gold.
Ash - A Secret History is comprised of the following parts:
Historically accurate depictions of war from the perspective of a mercenary captain, Ash, in the late medieval era, written by an expert in the field. Mary Gentle has a Master’s in War Studies and her love and deep understanding of the late medieval era shows. It’s gritty, it’s violent, it’s dark but more than anything Mary Gentle is committed to writing a story that feels real.
The wax candle melted down to a stump.
I’m prisoner here.
This is no Romance of Arthur or Peredur. I’m not about to scale the walls, fight off armoured men with my bare hands, ride off into the sunshine. What happens to valueless prisoners taken in war is pain first, broken bodies second, and an unmarked, unchristian burial afterwards. I am in their city. They own it now.
Fantastical / science fiction story beats that appear in the first few pages and continue to unravel in interesting ways as the story goes on.
Snow whirled faster from the invisible whiteness of the sky into the glade. Snow covered the green ivy, the red berries of the holly. Snow froze on the spindly brown arcs of briar. A great huffing animal breath came down from the altar of the ruined green chapel. Ash watched its whiteness on the air. Animal-breath hit her in the face, warm and wet.
A great paw trod down from the stone altar.
A frame story told from the perspective of a historian in the late 90s translating a manuscript containing Ash’s story.
Each chapter of her story is bookended by emails sent between the historian and his agent. As we understand more about Ash’s story, revelations made by the historian and his colleagues in the modern era influence our understanding of Ash’s story and vice-versa in a never ending corkscrew of revelations and implications.
[…] one must remember that exaggeration, legend, myth, and the chronicler’s own prejudices and patriotism, all form a normal part of the average mediaeval manuscript. Under the dross, there is gold. As you will see.
History is a large net, with a wide mesh, and many things slip through it into oblivion. With the new material I have uncovered, I hope to bring to light, once again, those facts which do not accord with our idea of the past, but which, nonetheless, are factual.
That this will then involve considerable reassessment of our views of Northern European history is inevitable, and the historians will just have to get used to it!
I look forward to hearing from you,
Pierce Ratcliff
A heavy dose of inspiration from long running soap operas featuring a never ending procession of secrets, mysteries and surprises combined with a revolving door of recurring characters that keep coming back no matter what (unless they die horrific deaths on the field of battle of course), always with a surprise or two under their belt.
The priest stared. “You’re a woman!”
Ash muttered, “That’s why I keep you on the company books, Godfrey. Your acumen. Your intelligence. The rapidity with which you penetrate to the heart of the matter.” She shot a look at the lantern and its marked hour-candle, burning steadily where it sat on the trestle table. “It’s nearly Nones. Godfrey, go and give that unruly mob out there a field-mass. Do it! I need time.”
If anything you’ve read here has piqued your interest and you’re willing to read one book for 40 hours or more, do yourself a favor and pick up a used copy of Ash - A Secret History and enjoy reading through a story unlike anything else you’ve read.
I’ve kept this review short and mostly spoiler-free because you deserve to be able go through Mary Gentle’s masterpiece blind. I could say so much more but I’ll stop myself here and just pray you give this gigantic brick a chance.
Mary Gentle has gained another loyal fan for life. I’m extremely excited to dig into the rest of her work.
NB: Here’s some spoilery thoughts I had about the book while I was reading it, kept here for posterity.
Chapter 1:
Oof but I’m intrigued. Summoning a mythological lion (God? a god?) and having it lick the protagonist in what seems to be a historical medieval fantasy story was pretty wild. Starting a book with a violent rape of a child followed by her murdering both of her assailants was wild. I don’t know what I was expecting from this text before reading it but it wasn’t this.200 pages in
like wtf is going on here. The mix and match between extremely grounded medieval historical fiction and the fantasy is cool.
I LOVE a good frame story. The historian losing his shit over previously historical documents being categorized as fiction is great. Some real Knights Templar / AssCreed shit, conspiracy shit.
That’s cool but then Ash’s story cool AF with a healthy dose rollercoaster ride action sequences, suspense, surprises, intrigue, all wrapped in what feels like an authentic-ish medieval war story told from an interesting POV.
400 pages in
I am continuing to be amazed by Mary Gentle’s ability to combine the mundane reality of running a mercenary company in the late 1400s with the fantasy scenes of 500 priests praying and manifesting a blizzard, a Jewish curse making the Sun disappear from an entire part of the world, Ash’s ability to communicate with, essentially, a computer versed in military tactics.
The mundanity makes the fantastic more believable somehow.
Also, Ash is not a stereotypical protagonist. Mary Gentle consistently subverts some of the tropes you might expect to see throughout the text. Ash is not a chosen one, she’s special in some ways but not in others.
Initially she is portrayed as being a chosen one of some kind and touched by God, a prophet of battle of sorts. But gradually this shifts as our understanding of the world Ash exists in is deepened. My perception of her shifted and made me think that Ash isn’t special or fated to achieve great things because she’s touched by God, she’s just a product of her upbringing and her genes.
But that understanding of Ash clashes with the fantastical elements present within the book which might lead us to believe that this world has one or more beings of great power, gods of some sort, that act on the world as we know it and who’s power can’t be fully comprehended by the people affected by it.
Or is it just a story within a story? What parts of Ash’s story can we believe to be true within the context of the novel when we’re told that the historian who’s translating the text is telling us that he’s watching his archeologist friend unearthing stone golems as described in the novel.
And does it matter?
Whether Ash was licked by a godlike blue lion in her childhood or not, does it matter? Whether Ash is real or not, does it matter?
To be clear she’s not real, but that DOESN’T matter.
The entire text is a defense of fiction as a medium and as a fantastic way to express truth about the world we live in and the lives we live.