I was lucky enough to receive a review copy of the debut novel by James Alistair Henry. You might not have heard of Henry, but you’ll certainly be acquainted with some of his previous TV output. He is a BAFTA-award winning writer behind Green Wing, Smack the Pony, Hey Duggie and even Bob the Builder.
Pagans is set in 21st Century London, but it’s a present-day some distance removed from the one we now know. We’re to imagine what the landscape would be like if we’d never been through the Norman Conquest, if Christianity had never materialised and the Industrial Revolution had never happened. Henry has conceived a Britain still divided into its ancient tribes of Saxons, Celts and Picts all worshipping a myriad of Pagan Gods. Onto this backdrop the author projects a murder-mystery that forces tribal differences to collide and ancient prejudices to be addressed in the course of the ensuing investigation.
Henry’s characters are well-rounded and interesting, and his locations are sufficiently familiar to make the reader feel at home yet distorted enough to unsettle him. One has a constant feeling of being on edge whilst reading.
I’ll provide no spoilers. Suffice to say that the book’s blend of genres will appeal to a cross-section of readers mixing, as it does, bloody murder with politics, adding a smattering of malleable history with a soupçon of fantasy. It’s an unusual book, for sure, and not my regular habitat but then I’ve never seen a single episode of Game of Thrones (I know – shameful). If you have, and it’s your bag, then Pagans will be right up your highway.
Anyone familiar with Lord of the Rings, who enjoys the Harry Potter books or has trudged his way through War & Peace won’t be phased by the abundance of unpronounceable character and place names. For the rest of us, in the style of some of the afore-mentioned tomes, Henry provides a helpful Cast of Characters at the front of the book plus a Glossary of unfamiliar words at the back. I turned down the corners of both pages because I found myself constantly referring to them, just as I did throughout my reading of Tolstoy’s classic.
The idea for Pagans owes much to Henry’s mobility as a young man. Finding himself transported to Kent from his native Cornwall, he says: “I was struck by the cultural differences between the East and West of the UK. To me the East felt quite aggressive, dog eat dog, and my home in the West was much more chilled out … I noticed a real East/West cultural divide when most people assume North/South is the big cultural separation … I wanted to explore how the idea of cheerfully violent Saxon invaders driving the gentler Cents into the West a thousand years ago feeds into cultural differences that remain all these centuries later.”
Pagans is released in Hardback, ebook and Audiobook on 27 February, 2025, by Moonflower Books. Available on Amazon and in all good bookstores.
