Jenny Diski - Sunday Times

"What you get instead is just another blockbuster." Jenny Diski - Sunday Times

They used to be called the Dark Ages, and not for nothing, it turns out, when you read Tom Holland's account of them: they took ages, and they were very dark indeed. Millennium covers a little more than 1,000 years, from AD66 when St John wrote down his Revelation of the End of Days, to 1098 as the first Crusaders arrived in Jerusalem and recaptured the Holy Sepulchre from Islam. The story actually begins in AD312 when Constantine crossed the Alps to Rome, conquered, converted, and became the first Christian emperor, making the once-persecuted sect of Christianity the spiritual and political force in the world, from its centre in Rome to the empire's capital in Byzantium. At least in theory.

What Holland is describing is the long battle for ascendency in that period, between the Church, represented by St Peter's stand-in, the Pope, and the constantly warring and dividing secular emperors who, by becoming Christian and being anointed just as the bishops were, took upon themselves the title of God's representative on earth. The context for the by-no-means-spiritual power struggle for exclusive authority over what was to become Europe, was the millennial expectation set up by St John's Revelation, which told of the imminent arrival of the Antichrist, who was set to reign for the 1,000 years preceding the second coming of Christ and the absolute happy-ever-after of the world. Vague religious expectation and mystical rumour provided those who had access to axes and swords, bows and arrows and lances, with the perfect excuse for all that ravaging and pillaging we hear so much about in the early Middle Ages.

Certainly, ravaging and pillaging is uppermost in Holland's narrative. Although beginning and end speak of fear of chaos and hope for salvation as the key to the period, the matter of the book is the endless fighting between ethnic groups of Lombards, Franks, Saxons, Vikings and Normans who put on Christianity like a holster to buttress their claim to power; and between the winners of those battles and the forces of Islam, who looked west to enlarge their territory and faith. It's not a subtle tale, but then neither are the Asterix comic books, which, at times, Millennium resembles. Or perhaps it's more of a Boy's Own yarn, with wild men wielding axes and going down like Trygvasson, the Christianised Viking, who lost a sea battle with Forkbeard and “adorned in golden armour and a bright-red cloak, leapt from the clawing fingers of his enemies into the sea; and when they made an attempt to rescue him, ‘he threw his shield over his head, and vanished beneath the waves'.”

The same Forkbeard, incidentally, who assassinated his own father with a carefully aimed arrow between the buttocks as he squatted down to empty his bowels. This is the constant beat of the story: one damn violent aggression after another, and I must confess that tales of derring-do have never been my cup of tea. Still, it's a fast and lively lesson in that period which school so often misses out, when you leap from the ancient world to the Renaissance, from Roman Britain to the Tudors, without more than a soundbite of all those early emperors, or Canute, Ethelred and Harold. Oh, that William of Normandy.

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However, there's not much more to the narrative than a who-killed-whom-and-when, and each-son-or-brother-worse-than-the-last kind of story. Holland says that “the silence of the poor is almost total”, but it isn't quite true. There have been histories, by the likes of Jacques Le Goff and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, which have taken a less top-down view and told the story of the poor and the everyday by scouring and interpreting records and including anthropology and archeology.

Millennium is action-packed, exhaustingly so. Simply a sign of the times Holland is writing about, perhaps, but I wonder if it isn't more a sign of the present times of publishing. I wonder, too, whether the thriller content isn't responsible for the style, which is remorselessly contemporary. Fulk the Good “had not hesitated to rub out his own ward”; Sylvester III was just “an anonymous patsy”; pilgrimage is “a must-do experience”; and the church at Cluny was not “remotely fit for purpose”. There is a chapter titled An Inconvenient Truth, a section called Things Can Only Get Better, and another, on the demand that priests as well as monks should be celibate, called Just Say No.

It may be an attempt at popularising a dim period of history, but it makes for an ugly read. It may, also, be an attempt to point up the “relevance” of the distant past, and Holland's over-insistence on the jihadist basis of Islam and the encroaching of the violent Saracens on the West suggests this might be the case. “Just as Muhammad himself, in the wake of his first great victory on the battlefield, had been presented by a servant with the severed head of his deadliest enemy, so had the caliphs harvested the heads of Christians”, while the Berbers “mercilessly beslathered the 'Ornament of the World' [Cordoba] with gore” and “The Saracens, unlike the Vikings, still held fast to their defiance of the Christian faith - and to their habit of tracing the frontiers of Christendom with blood”.

The temptation to play with the idea of Armageddon and the presently perceived threat from the East might be strong, but it feels at moments like one of those cold-war science-fiction films where the Martians stand for the Russians, as a terrible warning. The misconceived need for relevance, if that is what it is, and the jarring modern idiom take the reader further away from the Dark Ages, rather than shining a light on them. What you get instead is just another blockbuster.