She was tired of having to guide foolish men gently, from the side, instead of ordering them.
Menewood is Nicola Griffith's long awaited sequel to her 2013 historical novel Hild, which told the story of the early years of St. Hilda of Whitby. Menewood picks up where Hild left off. But where Hild covered the first 18 years of Hild's life, Menewood covers only the next three years. One has to believe that Griffith will write another sequel since St. Hilda lived to be 66 years old and is mostly known for the later years of her life.
As Griffith tells us in her Author's Note, Hild was a real person but the medieval sources that speak of her are few and all that we know of her early years was that she was "living most nobly in the secular habit." This leaves Griffith free to make up her story and fit that story into what is known historically about the period and the place.
The place is Northumbria. The period is 632 to 635 A.D. (I still stick with the old way of dating.) Hild's great uncle, Edward Yffing, is the King of Northumbria but there are forces opposing him, specifically Penda of Mercia and Cadwallon of Gwynned. Historically this is a time of almost constant war and Griffith does an excellent job portraying the ravages of war.
Hild wants only to live quietly with her husband in the land called Elmet that was given to them by the King. They are expecting their first child. But the King wants her with him when battle comes, because he does not trust the Roman Catholic bishop Paulinus to bring his god to help (Paulinus, in fact, flees with the Queen back to Kent). And who can deny a King?
Hild has a reputation as a seer but in reality she is just very smart and is able to make very good predictions based on the facts at hand and good strategic thinking. Edward wants her to predict his victory but she knows that is unlikely so she must hedge.
Cadwallon is the villain of the piece and interestingly we don't meet him in person through much of the novel. But we see his handiwork and, like Hild, I found him vile. So it was easy to be caught up in Hild's quest to, first, make her people safe from him and, second, bring him down.
If you are looking for a novel that gives you an excellent sense of time and place, you will find it here. When Griffith is writing about the flora and fauna of Northumbria, her writing is beautiful. There is also a story that, for two-thirds of the book, moves along (more on that later). And Hild is a compelling character. One thing that I really liked about this novel was the importance of all the women characters in fighting Cadwallon. Too often medieval women are portrayed as passive while the men are out fighting. These women are not passive (although they all need Hild to tell them what to do, of course.)
I am, however, ambivalent about this novel (as I was with the earlier novel). This is a very long novel, over 900 pages on my e-reader. I found the first three hundred pages very hard going. I had a hard time keeping the characters straight and I had a hard time keeping the locations straight. This despite a series of maps at the beginning as well as a detailed cast of characters and a glossary at the end of the novel. Possibly if I had re-read the first novel immediately before reading this one, the cast of characters would have been clearer to me.
Griffith admits that the background history of the first three hundred or so pages of the novel is fairly clear but that the historical facts about the second two-thirds are somewhat murky. And maybe it was because Griffith was hemmed in by the more exact history of the first 300 pages that these pages plodded along with names and places being important, but not character development. The secondary characters are, in general, underdeveloped throughout the novel but especially in the first 300 pages. That made it hard to care about them. Most of the time I was thinking: who is this? why are they so happy to see this person? why don't they like this person?
However, the second two-thirds of the novel moved along expeditiously. Maybe this is because Griffith could mostly make up her own story, not being as hemmed in by history? So if you can make it through the first 300 pages, you will end up in a story that, if not a total page turner, kept me very interested in what was going to happen next.
As I said, Hild is a compelling character. However, part of the issue with the secondary characters is that, in order for Hild to be seen as almost preturnaturally smarter than everyone, everyone else has to be a little bit dumb. That didn't bother me when it came to strategy. Some people are just better than everybody else at strategy. But it did bother me when it came to predictions about the natural world. When Hild predicts that it will soon become very cold because the birds are all flying south fast, I wondered why no other soul noticed that. She was in a farming community. These are people who live by the land - they would pay attention to almost every part of nature.
So, in short, I am ambivalent about this novel. I think Griffith set out to create the Northumbria of the Seventh Century as clearly as possible and to put Hild at the center of that geopolitical world. She achieved that. As far as setting us down in a specific time and place I think it is a tour de force. Hild is a compelling character. But the underdevelopment of the many, many secondary characters was a problem for me. And the first 300 pages, in my opinion, could have used a very blunt editor.
However, I remember that I was ambivalent about Hild, the first novel, too. Checking my notes I see that I thought the secondary characters were underdeveloped and I wondered if I would bother to read the sequel. All in all, I am glad that I decided to read it. It was a good long book to curl up with in the sub-zero temperatures.
