Votan

"For me, Votan , published in 1966, is an object lesson of how the quality of a book has absolutely no bearing on its success whatsoever. John Jones is a brilliant writer, I think Votan is a great book—and it is completely and utterly forgotten. I’ve only ever seen one living writer mention John James, which oddly enough was Neil Gaiman , who absolutely raves about him. But apart from Neil Gaiman and me, it seems no one in the world reads John James anymore. Votan is a novel about a Greek merchant called Photinus, who travels outside the Roman Empire sometime in the Antonine peace, probably late first, early second century AD. He travels into Germany and north to the Baltic. It’s an adventure novel. What’s very clever about it is that the adventures that Photinus has form the nucleus of the Norse sagas. In a sense, he becomes Votan (or Woden) the All-Father, and his settlement becomes Asgard. What happened to it becomes Ragnarök, the death of the gods. There is an incredibly clever literary play with the Norse sagas going on throughout this book. Now for me, as a historian, this smacks of The Golden Bough by James George Frazer or Robert Graves’s Greek Myths , that searching of every myth for a kernel of real historical truth. That couldn’t be less fashionable in modern scholarship. In a way, I ought to absolutely loathe this book, but I don’t, I love it because it’s so exciting and so well written. There’s one other thing to draw out about this book. Like Mary Renault, James manages to recreate an alien thought world, but he does it in a different way. With Mary Renault, you get that brilliant layering and texturing of historical detail that reminds me of Patrick O’Brian and his Jack Aubrey and Steven Maturin novels , that building up of a believable world with layer after layer, detail after detail. John James in Votan doesn’t do that. What he does is a more broad-brush approach where everything is just like us, but slightly offset and strange. It works really, really well."