In 1914 the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács proclaimed the novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.” As a literary form that arose at a moment when the world was beginning to lose faith in the old myths, the novel dramatizes the tension we now feel between immanence and transcendence—between the subjective meaning of our own lives and the absence of larger meaning in the world.
I’ve always found Lukács’s thesis a bit overblown, the frenzied theory of a young Hegelian possessed by the notion that artistic forms could be wedged into a historical dialectic. But I was thinking about it as I read the opening chapter of David Greig’s brilliant and entertaining first novel, The Book of I. The story is set during a period when the old myths were very much alive. It begins in 825, with a Viking raid on the isle of Iona (or “I”), the birthplace of Celtic Christianity in Scotland. It’s a tense, cinematic scene, reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan’s opening sequence of the Battle of Normandy: we see the Vikings in their boat as it races to shore, girding themselves for battle. We witness the fear and panic of the monks in the island monastery, preparing themselves for certain death. But before the subsequent chaos, a strange consciousness emerges from the void, as though it were witnessing the scene from a position of eternal indifference:
The waters around I are full of fish. Gannets dive among the rocks. A fierce tide races through the pale blue sound, carrying terns and puffins along on the white wave tips.
Small birds sing in the oak grove, skylarks rise and fall in the meadows, and ospreys soar.
Taken together, if you catch it in one of those sudden moments when it’s set in a bright shaft of sunlight, I is perfect: a miniature of the world.
The narrative voice is essentially bifocal, investing itself, at close range, in the human drama and the interiority of its characters, while occasionally withdrawing into a panoramic detachment that regards death and murder as no more or less important than the movements of the birds, the fish, and the tides.
The massacre is based on a historical reality: in 825 Danish warriors raided Iona in the hopes of obtaining a reliquary that belonged to the monastery and contained the bones of Saint Columba. When the monks refused to give up its location, the Vikings killed many of the brothers and tore the abbot limb from limb. It’s a scene that lives on in the annals of Christian martyrdom, though even the medieval hagiographers could not seem to stop themselves from imbuing their accounts with a sweeping, almost pagan aloofness and indifference to the human drama. A Benedictine monk who wrote about the massacre in the ninth century similarly began his account with a bird’s-eye view of the island: “Golden dawn shone forth, parting the dewy dusk, and the brilliant sun glittered with beautiful orb.”
Greig’s fictionalized account of the raid is told from the perspectives of three very different characters. The first is Martin, a young monk who is the only one of his order to survive the attack, thanks to a last-minute trip to the latrine when his bowels begin to loosen with fear. He hides out in the pit beneath the toilet, waist-deep in shit, promising God that he will devote the rest of his days to serving Saint Columba if only his life is spared.
The second perspective belongs to Grimur, a formidable Viking a little past his prime. He arrives at Iona shaking with alcohol withdrawal and has to stop on the beach to catch his breath while the younger warriors rush headlong into bloodshed. It’s remarkable how quickly he becomes sympathetic and deeply human, even as we watch him cut throats and smash heads against rocks. As a child, Grimur was told by his father that “the only purpose of a man was to fight, fuck and sail ships.” But he doesn’t particularly enjoy killing anymore, having arrived at a midlife malaise: “There had been a time in Grimur’s life when the world was all possibility, when his body grew stronger, his mind calmer, when every day he felt increasingly capable: with poetry, with politics, with the sea, with women. This was not that time.”
At one point during the raid, Grimur enters a cottage and guts a blacksmith who is hiding there with his wife. When Grimur turns to kill the wife, he finds her standing behind an enormous vat of mead. She holds out a bowl to him, and he takes it and drinks. He drinks another, and another, and soon he is unconscious. The wife, Una, completes the trio of main characters; she is a woman who’s crafty enough to make delicious mead and clever enough to use it to save her own skin.
The raid is a failure. The monks buried the reliquary of Saint Columba’s bones before the Vikings even reached shore, and the warriors eventually give up their search and head back to the ship. Before they sail away, one of them discovers Grimur passed out beside the blacksmith’s cottage. They assume he’s dead, dig a hasty grave, and bury him after an awkward makeshift funeral. Grimur, it turns out, was not particularly beloved by the other Vikings. None of them can remember his special warrior nickname, and the leader repeatedly refers to him as Gunnar.
Later that day, shortly after the Vikings depart, Martin, the monk, emerges from the latrine to find all his brothers in Christ slaughtered and the monastery burned. He begins the slow, impossible work of rebuilding the monastery, an act that, one senses, is less a divine mandate and more a compulsion to ease his survivor’s guilt and his shame at his own cowardice. He sings the Office of the Dead over the bodies of his brothers and when he comes upon Grimur’s grave decides, in a rapture of Christian forgiveness, to pray over the pagan as well. At the very moment when he sings, “Those who have done good deeds will go forth to the resurrection of life,” the Viking’s hand thrusts up through the soil. (The book’s dialogue is rendered in italics, as though the words existed in some limbo between thought and speech.) Christian justice is answered with tragic justice, that of a universe indifferent to good and evil, in which resurrection happens blindly and continually, until it doesn’t. When Brother Martin exclaims, “It’s a miracle,” Grimur answers, “It’s not a miracle, son, it’s a mix-up.”
These three characters—Martin the monk, Grimur the Viking, and Una the “mead wife”—are the only survivors on I. Most of the novel unfolds over the summer after the massacre, during a period of peace and rebuilding. We rarely see all three characters together; they are engaged in a triangulated dance of mutual aid. Una brings the monk a bowl of porridge in the morning. Martin and Grimur, meanwhile, forge an unlikely friendship of necessity. Martin is physically weak, and Grimur is happy to be put to work restoring the monastery, repairing the timbers and salvaging the thatch roof. Greig uses this improbable pairing—the Viking and the monk—to great comic effect, without its ever feeling forced. When the monk waxes poetic about Saint Columba’s finger, insisting that it’s a holy relic because it performed so many miracles, Grimur retorts, “Did he never pick his nose or wipe his arse?”
Martin sees the Viking as a potential convert, and over time Grimur does become attracted to Christianity. With Martin’s guidance, he repents of his many sins and is tonsured, though he still harbors a knife in his britches as well as some unspoken doubts. One day, leaving the church after a storm, he sees a rainbow in the sky. Having considered that it might be a divine omen, he thinks better of it: “But that’s when rainbows form, isn’t it? When the sun shines after a storm.”
Una is similarly earthly-minded and cannot put any faith in a realm beyond the here and now. She continues with her chores, now a widow with a cottage of her own—making her mead, returning to her bees. “Sorry I’ve been away,” she coos to the hive a few days after the raid. “Things have been a wee bit lively lately in the world of men.” The world of men seemingly has no bearing on the rhythms and resilience of nature. When she dips a finger into the honey, she tastes “pine, wine, sea, peat, dandelion, a little fermented apple… some bitterness, maybe a trace of regret. Not a trace of massacre.”
Grimur returns to her cottage for more mead, then finds reasons to linger. He brings her nettles and kelp and tends the fire while she cooks a stew. She watches him closely, studies his face in the firelight, and wonders at his melancholy: “When he’d killed the smith, he’d seemed to her like a wild bear, but now he was a different animal: placid, alone.” It turns out that she’s happy that her husband is dead. The blacksmith was abusive—he once broke her jaw, and she’d gone mute afterward. When Grimur asks her name and she replies, it is the first word she has spoken to anyone in more than ten years. The romance that develops between Una and Grimur is one of the novel’s many delights. Their dialogue is both strange and familiar, medieval in content but contemporary in tone. When she asks how his jarl, Helgi Cleanshirt, got his nickname, he replies:
What do you mean?
His nickname—does he not like blood on his shirt? Or does he clean the blood of his victims with his shirt? Or does he kill nobles whose shirts are clean? Or is it worse than that?
Worse?
Does he make women clean the blood of their husbands off his clothes?
No.
What then?
There was already a guy called Helgi on his uncle’s boat. One trip, that guy spilt stew on himself. So, he was Helgi Dirtyshirt. When Helgi Gustafsson joined up, we needed a name to distinguish him, so we called him Helgi Cleanshirt.
That’s all?
You have some very strange ideas about Vikings.
I know, but…
We’re not all about murder, you know.
The novel is set during a period when Celtic Christianity still lived in tension with ancient pagan traditions, and it is interested in the dissonance between these two worldviews. Its characters, especially Martin and Grimur, debate the eternal questions—the nature of life and the afterlife—and increasingly struggle to reconcile their visions of the world, one rooted in love, the other in strength; one in redemption, the other in cosmic indifference. “Christ calls for mercy,” the monk says. “Odin calls for blood,” the Viking answers. When Martin insists that God is love and that all things embody this love, Grimur can no longer take it:
The world is not love. The world is the opposite of love….
Have you ever seen an eagle take a lamb?…
They tear open the belly and eat the lamb alive from the inside. Then crows eat the eyes. Foxes take the rest. All the while the ewe stands by the corpse, sick with untaken milk, bleating. Is that love? The world is indifferent to us. The world is lust and fists and teeth and rock and tide and plague. Everything wants to kill you.
As autumn arrives, in the novel’s final movement, Grimur spots another red Viking sail on the horizon. Girding himself for a raid, he abandons his fledgling Christian faith. Much like Max von Sydow’s character in Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960), who, after his daughter’s murder, disowns his adopted Christianity and reverts to the vengeful pagan gods he’d renounced, Grimur slaughters a horse and sacrifices it to the Norse gods in the monastery chapel. Greig is a Scottish playwright and theater director, and The Book of I has the visual immediacy and verbal lightness of the best tragicomedy.
In an interview last year Greig confessed that he’d always thought of playwrights as “hacks,” not real writers: “All my life, I had wanted to do a book, but every time I sat down to do it, I would write just the most awful rubbish, because I was trying to be clever and important.” The Book of I had an unlikely starting point. Greig was solicited to write a thriller on Scottish history for a series of novellas aimed at tourists. (The book was originally published in 2023, as part of that series, under the title Columba’s Bones.) The format was ultimately freeing, allowing him to get out of his own way: “That was a huge door opening for me, because suddenly I was slightly back to being a hack again, if that makes sense,” Greig said.
I wasn’t sitting down to write the great Scottish novel and then failing because it was so stupid. In fact, I was now sitting down to write an exciting story set in the past…. For the first time, I was writing something that I might actually want to read, and it had never occurred to me that that was something that you could do. I thought novels had to be slightly boring and difficult.
It’s an irony that will ring familiar to many artists: no one gets anywhere, creatively, by trying to play God. It’s only by working close to the ground, remaining attentive to the immanence of human affairs, that you can hope to reach something transcendent.
The writing of a book is also central to the plot of The Book of I. With Grimur largely taking over the restoration of the monastery, Martin shifts his focus to completing the Book of I, an illustrated copy of the Holy Gospels commissioned by the king (and a fictional version of the Book of Kells). It’s a beautiful manuscript, illuminated with colorful and ornate illustrations. Even Grimur is in awe of it. When he asks Martin to read the first lines of the Gospel of John (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”) and then asks him to explain, Martin gives the passage a unique theological gloss: “It’s something like ‘Everything is a story, a story told by God, and the story is God.’”
There are moments when Greig’s novel also appears to be a story told by God—or nature, or fate. Beyond the lives of its three characters looms that elusive fourth perspective that hovers over its opening pages. It seems almost to belong to the sky, a narrative vantage that feels entirely alien to the psychological earnestness of so much contemporary fiction, and offers a refreshing sense of distance. At a crucial moment of the massacre, when the abbot is about to be drawn and quartered, the narrator, who has thus far been closely observing the raid, pauses and notes: “If you had seen the scene from God’s point of view…”
Such interludes recur throughout the novel. In the midst of a conversation or a battle scene, the story pauses for the impassive gaze of nature: “A kestrel hunted in the new-mown meadow.” “An owl screeched from the stable roof.” Some of these moments feel especially pointed, offering a kind of corrective to the meaning that the characters are eager to project onto their own lives. After Martin is given confession, for the first time in months, by a visiting bishop, the narrator observes:
And that was that.
His slate was clean….
Martin felt God’s mercy wash across the shoaling beach of his soul.
The kestrel ate the field mouse.
In her 1939 essay on the Iliad, Simone Weil argued that art has lost the tragic gaze of the Greek epic, which stemmed from a vision of cosmic justice that is not retributive but indifferent. Everyone, without exception, will be subject to misfortune. Everyone, without exception, will experience divine grace, which is not a special dispensation but “spreads over the whole human race, impartial as sunlight.” The genius of the Iliad, Weil wrote, is that amid all the violence and suffering, “nothing precious is scorned.” Even as the poem reflects the blind brutality of the pagan cosmos, it pauses over instances of beauty, heroism, and love, not because these qualities cancel out the suffering or redeem it but simply because they too are a part of the world that deserves attention. Weil believed that European writers would never again produce a work of genius until “they learn that there is no refuge from fate.”
Greig’s novel is more comic than tragic, but there are moments when it perfectly inhabits the narrative gaze that Weil describes. As invested as it is in the question of theodicy and the true nature of the cosmos, be it love or violence, the novel refuses to take sides. It accepts the reality of the Holy Spirit, which “passed through every one of the brothers” as they prepared for martyrdom, just as it takes as given the existence of “Old Tit Scratcher,” Grimur’s personal Valkyrie, who offers him instructions in battle. The strangeness of the book’s outlook comes, at least in part, from the sense that, much like the historical period it describes, it is torn between a pagan and a Christian understanding of the world.
If all redemptive stories are essentially messianic, then in Greig’s novel, as in history, Christianity wins. But the happy ending is also clearly tenuous, one more thing that simply happens in a world of endless flux. If there is any kind of authorial commentary to be found in this ideological drama, it is a skepticism toward religious asceticism—or perhaps, more broadly, the notion that spiritual transcendence can be reached directly and deliberately by rejecting the things of this world. One of the most revealing passages concerns Martin’s desire for God:
Of course, in one sense, Martin saw God every day, but those were just ordinary noticings: geese crossing the sky, a duck landing on water, the music of the sea, the arrival of plums on a branch—all beautiful, but, in the end, merely decorative.
Nor did Martin give much value to those common moments when he felt his soul opening, raw, tangible and physical—like in the afterglow of a grief, or remembering his mother, or following a kindness.
Those moments were like seeing the house of God from the outside.
Martin wanted to enter the house. He wanted to be surrounded by God, to be one with God, to dissolve in the enormity of God, to swim in the everything and always of God, to find his soul in the unimaginable and universal NOW of God.
That’s what Martin wanted.
It is one of the novel’s few moments of dramatic irony. One senses that what Martin dismisses as “decorative” and “common” are precisely the sites of grace where the presence of God dwells, that it’s only the desire to go further, to be absorbed into the embryonic soup of the divine, to make happiness static and permanent, that creates so much suffering among people of faith. Una, with her aversion to abstractions and her attention to ordinary things, understands this best. “In each day which passes, no matter how hard it feels to bear, you can find something,” she observes. “Something to lighten the load; a joke, a face, some food, a song, a child, a man. Sometimes all of them in one day.” It’s in this vision of the world as both temporal and redemptive that paganism and Christianity might (as her name suggests) become one. Grimur, too, has moments of clarity when he senses a grace that is freely given and devoid of final aims: “Unlike Martin, Grimur felt content. Why shouldn’t he? He was fed and fucked and far away from trouble. Perhaps this was what Christians meant by Heaven: a simple sufficiency?”
It’s an insight that is not so far from the truth that appears in the mystics of many religious traditions: there is no mountain to climb; the Kingdom of God is already here, for those who care to partake; if we could get out of our own way and see how small we appear from the vantage of eternity, we’d discern, amid all the pain and suffering of our lives, a harmony that we’d yearned for in gazing up at the sky.
English (US) · 