It seems that every year or so someone makes a post here about what a great book Ash: A Secret History is. I suppose this year it is my turn. [About a year ago I read this review of the novel](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/wg0a5y/mary_gentles_ash_a_forgotten_1113_page/) and it stuck in my mind for months. Something about it spoke to me. Mystery? Alt-history? A certain grittiness? Audacity perhaps? Eventually I bought it on Amazon and that was the best reading decision I have made in a long time.
[*Ash: A Secret History*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash:_A_Secret_History), by Mary Gentle, is the best book I have read in years. The book is about the eponymous Ash, a female 15th century Burgundian mercenary captain who hears a voice that she believes to be a saint giving her military advice. And it only gets weirder from there.
The bulk of the novel follows Ash on her adventures in an alternate history late medieval Europe. It also uses an epistolary framing device where each section opens with a series of emails between the professor translating the work, his literary agent, and other relevant parties. The premise of this device is that the professor is completing a translation of a medieval manuscript which contains the diegetic text of the novel. This framing device is leveraged in several ways. Firstly, our professor Pierce Ratcliffe is just as well realized a character as anyone else in the story. His emails read exactly like an older professor slightly befuddled by modern technology, but still incredibly smart and charismatic, in a slightly old-fashioned way. I buy him completely as an Oxford academic. The framing device also allows Dr. Ratcliffe to insert footnotes explaining things, which are actually Gentle inserting footnotes to explain things, but without breaking the diegesis to do so.
Mary Gentle was completing a Masters in War Studies while writing this book, and it shows over the course of the book. The combat scenes have a verisimilitude I have seen matched nowhere else in fiction. They are frantic, confused, visceral, and frightening. When they start it’s like tipping over the edge of a roller coaster, you know things are about to kick up a gear. But she doesn’t glorify violence. Characters shit themselves in fear, are wounded, kill and are killed in very grounded ways. There are no great heroes, only people trying to achieve their goals. Finally on this point, the battles make sense. When combat begins you always know what is going on and why. You know how the troops are dispositioned and what they are trying to do. And it is all justified in the text because our protagonist occupies a command position so the exposition never feels forced; it’s natural for a commander to receive reports and give orders in battle so it’s natural for you to know.
This combines with the framing device into one of my favourite little bits of the book. Each time a battle happens Gentle uses tactics and scenarios from real life to add colour to them. But through the footnotes Dr. Ratcliffe explains where these tactics and events happened and suggests they were added by the original chronicler for flavour. This way the reader is fed more information without attention ever being drawn to it. I cannot emphasize enough how smoothly the framing device is integrated into the bulk of the story. It’s impressive.
I do not want you to go away with the notion that this is a mechanical nuts-and-bolts military action story. It is anything but. The characters are vivid, believable, and act true to their established characters. One of the major supporting characters, Florian, is a surgeon serving in Ash’s company, and his hatred of violence and killing is repeatedly brought up against his serving in a mercenary company. He loathes the fighting but there is nothing he can do about it. Another supporting character, Fernando, is just a spoiled rich kid suddenly flung into war. Over the course of the novel he has to grapple with his weaknesses and find a way to overcome them, if not in the way you might expect. And of course our protagonist Ash, given the story is told from her perspective, receives particular character study. She is one tough son of a bitch, having grown up in a mercenary camp. The book opens with her at eight years old, managing to kill two men who had just raped her. In the next scene she goes to slaughter an ox and struggles with the deed. The contrast of these two scenes informs her entire character throughout the novel; capable of spectacular violence, but not necessarily happy about it. She is fascinating.
Her trials and tribulations over the course of the novel allow for exploration of feminist themes without dwelling on them. She deals with the patriarchy quite literally in an arranged marriage. She grapples with pregnancy and a miscarriage. She suffers from sexual assault. She also bests men in combat and is unapologetically a sexual being. All of it is part and parcel of living in the 15th century and so it is depicted.
Gentle also put her medieval studies to work depicting the world. While she never drags out a scene showing off her knowledge of the medieval world, she does fit in tidbits and depictions of medieval life whenever appropriate. This adds life and character to the world and serves to make it feel real, rather than just 21st century people with cruder technology. This is one of the true strengths of the novel. Instead of a ASoIaF style cynicism of religion the characters in this novel truly believe in God, the Green Christ, and all the rest. Ash uses a “charm” as contraception because she truly believes it works. Because that’s what people in the 15th century actually believed.
Above I mentioned that this is an alternate history. While I will not dive too deeply into it, because again spoilers, I like how the alternate history aspects are slowly incorporated into the story. At first the world appears to be strictly historical fiction, but over the course of the novel the different aspects of the alternate history appear and are integrated into the narrative. They play into the central mystery of the novel, and together with the two plots converge at the climax. The drip feed of details is extremely well done and every time you think you finally understand something Gentle stops you and reveals another detail.
You will note I have not discussed the plot much. That’s because it’s hard to do without spoiling the major revelations of the story. For the first three quarters of the novel I had no idea where they story was going to end up. While the story twists and turns it never feels arbitrary. The events simply lead one into another and the pacing keeps you engaged for the whole wild ride. Towards the end the frame narrative and the “bulk” narrative begin to converge and we see the same events examined through both the 15th century and 21st century minds. This helps the reader finally put into context the events of the bulk of the novel and actually understand what they have only half glimpsed so far.
This book is unlike any other book I have read. It combines historical fiction, alternate history, and fantasy in a way I have never seen before but hope to see again. If you like mysteries, fantasy, historical fiction, strong female characters, or any combination thereof you absolutely need to read it.
by Zrk2