tearthyflesh's reviews
36 reviews

How I came to read this book was a little strange. My mother recently turned 60, and I chose a card with a multimedia illustration of a hedgehog - gouache, ink, and what appears to be oil pastel. I recognised the style, and the back of the card told me the artist was Brian Wildsmith. Best known for his children's books, Wildsmith started his career illustrating other people's novels. One of these book wrapper illustrations was for a novel called The Queen's Brooch, and features a multicoloured Celtic warrior in the same detailed and distinctive gouache, ink, and pastel media as the hedgehog card. I've always enjoyed historical fiction - as you can tell from my Read list - and was curious enough to look it up. Anyway, as it transpires, The Queen's Brooch is a children's book. However, the author Henry Treece, wrote some historical novels for adults.

The Golden Strangers is an interesting book. I've not read many set in what I assume is the late Chalcolithic/early Bronze Age era, as it arrives in Britain with the copper 'sword[s] out of the sun' in the hands of Celtic invaders. I love archaeology, and am fortunate enough to live in a place littered with menhirs and quoits. Go out onto the moors and throw a stone, and you're bound to hit a megalith of some kind.

The book follows multiple characters. Garroch, the son of the Old Man of his people; Brach, his favourite daughter; Rua, an unfortunate woman of a nearby tribe of fisherfolk who kills her father to become Garroch's unwanted wife; Barduca, king of the invading Celts, and Isca, the Celtic princess. The differing points of view aren't limited to separate chapters, and often switch from paragraph to paragraph. This can be a little dizzying at times, and can unfortunately pull the reader away from the perspective of the character the chapter largely focuses upon. It can also lead to the prose telling us how a character is feeling and why. This can be a little distracting, but the general feel of the novel is one told in a smoky hut, around a fire in the depths of winter, and I can't say that it detracts from that particular ambience too much.

Brutality is commonplace within the novel. Characters are variously sacrificed, raped, tortured, smothered in corn dollies, mauled by wolves, humiliated, and are often terrified of the turning of the seasons, their gods, the titular Golden Strangers, and the land itself. There is cannibalism, incest, war, starvation, and slavery. The style of the prose leaves this brutality somewhat detached at times, even when fairly detailed in its description. Again, this fits the saga-like feel of the novel. However, I'd suggest to those interested in this book and concerned about triggering content that they may want to check out the warnings below before reading. I have a strong stomach and I'm not easily disturbed by brutality in fiction, but the unrelenting misery and bloodshed sometimes left me a little exhausted. The story often feels especially unkind towards women. The novel was written in the 1950s, and features the typical, patriarchal image of the past. We don't know how real women were treated in ancient Britain; the Golden Strangers doesn't attempt to do anything new or interesting with the place of women in Garroch's tribe, and quite often the female characters face their downfall through their love for the men around them, but I still found them interesting. I enjoyed vengeful Rua, and the fierce love Brach feels for her grandfather and father. I couldn't quite get a handle on Isca, however.

The prose is lyrical. I really enjoyed the writing itself, even when the dialogue could be clunky and declarative. I do understand the reasoning for this, though. It fits with the general epic style of the book, despite being stilted and a little painful to read at times. Here are some samples of the descriptive prose. I particularly like the first and last excerpts I've shared here:

The land haunts the narrative, as you can see. It is in turns cruel and kind, with the characters desperately trying to appease the Earth Mother or Sun God to spare their people for another season, even when livestock and villagers must be sacrificed to achieve this goal. The descriptions of the land mirror this - at times beautiful and joyous, at others harsh and unrelenting, in summer as much as it is in winter.

As someone who is interested in archaeology (as a total amateur with no formal education bar one course, and reading some non-fiction books), I had to throw aside my desire to go, "well, ACTUALLY..." a great many times while reading. There are a lot of inaccuracies. I get the feeling that some of these inaccuracies might have come from disproven theories from when the story was written in the 50s, and some were thrown in for the purpose of weaving a more interesting story. There are a few historical gems to be unearthed from between the pages, though. I was delighted to see a mention of "[...] beakers, and to mark them with cord-patterns and herringbone whorls." Anybody who has seen one of the vessels created by the Beaker Culture in a museum will recognise their description here. The start of the book mentions the Mesolithic flooding of Doggerland (something I am fascinated by), and though it is incredibly historically inaccurate, I liked that the ancient people known as Hunters are likely meant to be a remnant population of Neanderthals judging by their description. Additionally, the Hunter character Asa Wolf sometimes felt more humane than many of the anatomically-modern human characters - he counsels Garroch to be gentler as a ruler, is generally level-headed, shows great loyalty to his dear friend, and even speaks of how with his people,

compared to the often cruel and vengeful anatomically-modern human characters. That was a nice touch. It would have been easy to have written Asa Wolf to be a kind of grunting caveman archetype, and I'm glad the book didn't go in that direction.

This review has used a lot of words to say very little. Would I recommend this book to most people? Probably not. Did I enjoy the book? Yes, I liked the narrative style and the prose itself, despite the incredibly stilted dialogue and the poor depiction of women. Will I read it again? Maybe. Did I immediately suggest it to a friend of mine who is also interested in this era of history? Absolutely, before I'd even finished the book - which only took me a day, as I found I couldn't put it down once I'd started.

I have been nagging my partner and friends to read this since I finished it. Thoroughly enjoyable, nasty, weird, and I keep meaning to re-read it. It circled around in my brain for ages after I'd finished it. Not a perfect book by any means, but I really did love it, and sought similar books once I'd finished - to little effect. If you've read something you'd suggest based on this, please let me know. Sometimes it's nice to read a book which isn't a 5/5 but which still tickles your brain, and Between Two Fires is one of those books for me. 

Perhaps when my partner gets around to it, I'll read it again alongside him. It's precisely the kind of book he'd love (which I know is incredibly unhelpful to anybody reading this review to see whether they'd like it or not, as they don't know him, but to those who have read this book, it probably says a lot about him). 

If I could rate this book, which I can't as I DNF'd it, I would give it 2/5 ⭐️s.

I really wanted to like this book, and I feel bad that I just didn't get on with it. The blurb sounded really interesting. However, this book wasn't for me.

The biggest issue I had with this book was the amount of telling. We are constantly told how characters feel, or why they are doing things. Two of the three main point of view characters mostly seem robust enough in construction that this doesn't feel necessary. A shame, because the exploration of trauma and relationships otherwise really rung true. There are moments where Dimitri's anguish and suffering are shown through his actions, but that's then ruined by the sheer amount of telling. It was especially frustrating when something was told to us, and then shown right after it.

I thought it was interesting to have part of the book told from the abuser villain's perspective. I liked parts of his chapters - for example, his creation of the Holy Science as the new, state-approved version of the Jewish-inspired religion the cast follows. In fact, 'Holy Science' as a phrase in the blurb was what drew me to the book. I was intrigued as to what it meant. However, Alexey felt like such a cartoonish villain at points, especially his prediction for wearing all black. He literally says, "you dare defy me?" at one point, which felt very... Saturday morning cartoon villain-esque. Perhaps the odd chapter from his perspective would have been fine, but having one third of the book from Alexey's point of view often felt like rehashing the ground of "look how evil he is". Yes, we know. We've seen what his abuse and cruelty have done to Dimitri and to his country as a whole. He felt like a composite of other hot, sexy villain characters at times.

The pace was very slow, and reading this book felt like a slog. I don't think this was helped by the story starting after the war, after the characters had escaped their homeland. It was doubly not helped by being told what the characters experienced and how they feel about it. I found myself wishing that the book had been set during all the action, and that this was a sequel. 

The dialogue was usually fine, but between the characters in Dimitri's court, it often ended up sounding either too meaningful, too well-articulated (like the type to be screenshotted or photographed to be shown out of context as something deep and true), or endless snarkiness and sex jokes. This, combined with the poor writing, made the book feel like it was intended for a younger audience. I often found myself assuming the characters were all in their late teens, which they aren't. 

I guess the sex scenes were okay. I don't read books for the sex scenes, generally, but I like how they were used to explore Dimitri's trauma. It was actually quite surprising to see that some reviewers didn't understand why he was fantasising about and longing for his abuser. Sometimes brains and feelings just work that way. It's sad, and I think the novel got that across fine. Either way, I think I would have preferred fewer full sex scenes in the long run. It works to establish Dimitri's unhealthy way of dealing with his trauma and to explore the aftermath of his sexual abuse and grooming at the hands of his ex-husband, but it felt repetitive in the long run.

In terms of what else I liked, I did like the scene where the court visit the evil library and the man who cares for it, just because something was finally happening. Though again, it felt cartoonish, which was a shame. Speaking to an angel to ask for a blessing while coked up as part of the ritual was also a neat idea! I liked that. More of that kind of stuff, please. The parts which were based on Jewish religious traditions were generally interesting; I would have liked to have seen more of that earlier in the novel. By the time the bigger chunks of that aspect of the novel came around, I was already fed up with the book and found it harder to engage, despite my interest being piqued.

Overall, this book felt disappointing. I really wanted to like it. Perhaps I will try to finish it at some point, but right now, I'm just fed up with it. I don't read a whole lot of fantasy at the moment, and it was a shame to be let down by this one when it could have driven me to dive back into the genre again.