The Nameless Day - Sara Douglass

They say never judge a book by its cover, and I'm afraid I might have fallen foul of this. I picked up the sequel to this, the second in The Crucible series at a second hand book shop, picked up purely because of how promising the cover looked. Reading the blurb, the story sounded solid, and for £2.40, how can you say no? Obviously you can't start a trilogy in the middle, so the first book - The Nameless Day followed soon after. And, well, there's mixed feelings.

1348, Europe is in the merciless grip of the Black Death, but Brother Wynkyn de Worde must make the long journey from Rome to the forests north of Nuremburg in time for the Nameless Day. The Nameless Day is the one day of the year when the veil between Earth and the Underworld grows thin. Deep in the forest, de Worde must use magic entrusted to him alone by the Archangel Michael to guard the gate between worlds, and ensure it closes again, to prevent the horrors of Hell from being unleashed on the Earth.

30 years after de Worde's last mission, Brother Thomas Neville, receives a message from the Archangel Michael and embarks on the same journey, determined to find out what happened to de Worde, and the secret to saving Europe from the demonic evil threatening to overwhelm it.

I do enjoy a fictional account of real life events, there are plenty of actual historical characters here, including both royalty and the famous leaders of the 14th century peasant uprising. The dates and the timeline aren't completely historically accurate but Douglass owns up to this in the Author's Note, to make it fit the story. I'd usually get irritated when authors so blatantly disregard major historical points but the fact that Douglass owns up to it and explains her reasoning in the author's note at the front lets her off the hook and in all honesty, I'm not exactly an expert on 14th Century Europe anyway. To be fair, you probably wouldn't even notice unless you were an expert on 14th Century Europe, in which case feel free to be irritated.

I quite enjoyed the concept of the book, though it is quite different to the blurb (don't promise me Black Death then have it al be over in the first 20 pages, what a let down), and the writing, though a little wordy in places is well paced and flows. What makes this a difficult read is Brother Thomas. The Nameless Day has one of the most insufferably arrogant and hypocritical main characters I have ever had the misfortune of reading. I do have stronger thoughts on Thomas Neville, but I know my mum reads this blog (hi Mum), so I'll leave it PG. Every person he comes into contact with gets the full force of his righteous indignation, so much so that I don't know how anyone can stand him. At one point he call mountains "vile things...useless accumulations of rock that serve no useful purpose to mankind" which is obviously a one-way fast track ticket to my bad books. He tells a grieving merchant that his (the merchants) brother who died slowly and in agony after falling down a mountain crevasse while his family listened, is definitely in hell because he had the audacity to die without a priest present. Every woman he comes into contact with - married, widowed, virginal, it doesn't matter, is labelled a harlot and a whore... except for the married woman he had an affair with before becoming a priest, who he considers virtuous and saintly. Top notch obtuse hypocrisy here, what a weapons-grade honker.

Look, I get that we're trying to be true to the time here (timeline notwithstanding), and the Medieval church and its priests weren't exactly known for their progressive feminist values, but the sheer amount of misogyny is honestly a bit much. You can convey that this is a time where women were second class citizens without having to remind us that we're are worthless harlots, who should be used only for procreation and then discarded every single time a woman even crosses Thomas' mind, never mind his path. It's pretty much every other page, and it's absolutely relentless and over the top (the cleft between a woman's legs is akin to the cleft to hell, got it), to the point where I'm like, Sara, mate, are you okay? Is there anything you need to share with the group?

For the first half of the book I was pretty sure this was going to become a hate read, just sticking with it to see if Thomas got his comeuppance, or at least some sort of redemption arc from being an insufferable arse. Gotta say, I was definitely on the side of the demons. But then, the second half introduced some far better characters, Thomas started to become slightly less easier to hate, and I have to say, I was intrigued to see where it was all going. It's become a bit of a trope these days that the Church are actually the bad guys and the true hero was the Devil all along, and while I am definitely a fan of this storyline, it looks like the Crucible series isn't going to go down the path I thought it was, which is definitely interesting.

I'm reading the second book already - I'm firmly still Team Demon, but let's see how The Wounded Hawk and The Crippled Angel play out.