Between Two Fires

"Chris Buehlman is an American author. He’s very, very well known for a book called The Blacktongue Thief , which did phenomenally well. Everybody knows him for that book, and he’s writing a prequel to that, I think, as we speak. I don’t quite remember how I stumbled across Between Two Fires . It was his second book – well before The Blacktongue Thief, which was his sixth – and at the time I believe it didn’t land very well, it didn’t hit the market in quite the right way. The rights reverted to him, and he self-published it. And I picked it up because it had, again, religious themes. It’s about a man called Thomas. He’s wounded at the Battle of Crecy in 1346, part of the Hundred Years’ War. And he gets an arrow in the face – in his jaw. During the course of his convalescence, he’s divested of all his land holdings by a rogue lord. So he resorts to a life of brigandage and is pillaging the countryside, when he comes across this young girl – I think she’s probably about twelve or thirteen. The band of brigands, they’re going to do awful things to her, so he kills all of them and saves her; and she says, “I need to get to Avignon” – where the Pope was based at that time. So he ends up taking her across France. At this time, France is in the throes of bubonic plague. There’s a really good book which has a chapter on the bubonic plague, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer , who’s a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He talks about how it killed three-fifths of the population of Europe, and takes two or three paragraphs to sit back and say, “Actually imagine what a profound horror that would have been. Your friends are dying, your family’s dying, and you have absolutely no idea why, because the medical science just wasn’t there.” One of the things he talked about was how incredibly evangelical people would have been in 14th-century England – they would have been extremely, extremely devout. A lot of them would have believed very strongly and tangibly that the bubonic plague was divine judgment, and it would have been utterly terrifying for them. “One of the things I love about fantasy is it’s such a wonderful way of holding a mirror up to modern society” So Between Two Fires takes place against this dismal backdrop. We’re moving through France, and it’s obviously all very frightening and there are corpses everywhere. I didn’t really realise this when I was first reading the book, but it’s actually a horror novel as well – a medieval fantasy horror. The first inkling we have of this is when they reach a river, and the locals say, “There’s a demon in the river. If you sort it out, we’ll reward you.” And I was like, “Oh! There is literally a monster!” – and it just gets worse and worse from there. What Chris does really well is very biblical monsters and demons: they have things like eyes on their chests and hands for feet and so on, like the creatures on an illuminated medieval manuscript. He’s been quite faithful to that aesthetic. They pick up a priest who is gay and closeted, so he’s fighting his own ordeal – as a consequence, he’s a drunk – and the three of them traipse across plague-ravaged France. At the same time, it’s the War in Heaven—literally—so there’s this big Divine Comedy or Dr Faustus vibe to it. The horror is both subtle and very, very overt. For example, there’s a bit where everybody hides at night because all the church statues have come to life, and they’re wandering the streets murdering people. The statues have their sceptres and they’re smashing the doors in and killing people. It’s a very, very frightening book! At the end, Thomas literally goes to hell for a stint, and that’s also very well done and very horrible. It’s a brilliant, brilliant book. And I just hadn’t heard of it. I was utterly enthralled; it was one of the best books I’ve ever read. I think it’s finding its audience now, and very quietly it’s becoming much more popular. You get different types of fantasy novel. Obviously, you get different types of every sort of novel. But I think within fantasy you tend to get either the big sweeping plot-driven books – for example, to come back to The Lord of the Rings , there’s very little internality. You never get a few paragraphs of Gimli ruminating on something. It’s all very much: Gimli and Legolas did this, then they went there, then they did this, and then Aragorn said this to this bloke. It’s just a sequence of events. It’s a bit reductive to say that, but if we compare it to a lot of modern fantasy, we now see a lot more internality. We’re interested in the characters, what they’re thinking and feeling, the dynamics between them. Ultimately, I think that’s the engine that drives all fiction and makes it interesting. I think what Chris, and a lot of these books that I read now, do very well is that character internality. Everyone is given their own head, they think and reflect. And it’s not just about, “Oh, it’s cold, so therefore I’m miserable.” It’s also very existential reflection. I think that’s what makes a lot of modern fantasy and a lot of modern fiction more generally much more compelling, and I think the genre is moving in the right direction in that respect."

"This is a really interesting book. It had quite an unconventional publishing journey, but it became something of a cult hit. It’s not a traditional post-apocalyptic book, but it tells the story of an excommunicated knight turned brigand. He comes into the company of a young girl who might be a saint, and they travel through medieval France during the Black Death. The whole book is like walking through a Hieronymus Bosch painting. You have a chaotic, magical disintegration of the world, which everyone is absolutely sure is the end of days. We, the readers, know it is just a plague, that things are going to continue. But the characters feel like everyone is going to die: the end of the world has come. The whole book is like a fever dream, a dark grail quest where they move from one place to another, all beset with magical monsters. There’s one really memorable scene in a spectral castle where they go to a horrific feast where people are eating monkey brains. There’s a real sense of something chilling happening before they wake up and the castle has disappeared. It’s a marvellous book about people going through the apocalypse and coming out the other side. A common thread in human reactions to these kind of apocalyptic events is the desire for it to have been prophesied. When the Spaniards arrived on the coast of Mexico in the early 16th century, the Aztecs or Mexica said they had seen a comet—appearing blood red like a flame in the sky. And in the mountains of Peru, the Inca also said the arrival of the Spanish had been prophesised by various signs—that an eagle had been attacked by condors in the main square in Cusco. If we can place these incomprehensible occurrences within a kind of cosmic logic, if we can say: it was prophesized and then it happened, we can make sense of it. When the fall of Constantinople occurred, they are supposed to have seen some kind of eclipse of the moon—it’s a bit hard to understand what they are describing. They say the moon was supposed to be half full but that it rose as a crescent. I find it very interesting. And kind of touching as well. One of the things that struck me most about the Sumerians, the earliest culture I look at in the book—they thrived from about 3000BC to 2000BC—was that, in the final years of the empire they were visited by the comet Hale-Bopp, which I remember seeing as a seven-year-old in 1997, standing outside in the garden with my dad. It travels on this huge elliptical orbit that goes outside of the solar system. The last time it had passed by was during the reign of King Shar-Kali-Sharri, one of the final kings of the Akkadian Empire. It made me feel connected to those ancient people who had seen this very same comet pass by."