I’ve always found the polymath Robert Irwin’s writing to be bracingly intelligent and immensely cultured. Irwin’s inclusion in his 1999 Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature of the lexical rarity, riman, a Bedouin word which means “the sound of a stone thrown at a boy”, would be enough on its own to induce me to give his new novel a favourable review. Not to mention his introduction in 2014 to Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, an anthology of Arab tales discovered in a library in Istanbul, which is the uglier, yet still fascinating, cousin of the Thousand and One Nights.
The Wars of the Roses are the backdrop for Wonders Will Never Cease. There is a long list of characters at the beginning of the book to remind those of us who dozed off in history class or when attending Shakespeare’s plays about the key players in the struggle between the House of Lancaster and the House of York. The novel features the real-life Anthony Woodville, the second Earl Rivers, who in Irwin’s version dies and is resurrected – or perhaps has the medieval equivalent of a near-death experience – on Palm Sunday 1461 at the battle of Towton, one of the biggest battles ever fought on British soil. He goes on to take part in a two-day dust-up with the killing machine and bibliophile that was Antoine, the Bastard of Burgundy (again, a real-life event).
The 15th-century military life is rendered with great skill by Irwin, and he makes many of the historical figures memorable characters. There is a whiff of The Once and Future King about the jousting training that Woodville undergoes, but as you might assume from the fact that he keeps on bumping into the roaming dead, this isn’t a straight spurs-and-swords yarn.
I assume that Irwin chose Woodville as his main character because it allows him to take off into the realm of myths, stories and storytelling. The original Woodville translated the contemporary French text The Four Last Things, as well as one of the first books published by Caxton in England, Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, a French version of a Latin text based on an Arabic anthology. Caxton himself gets a walk-on part, as does Sir Thomas Malory, the compiler of Le Morte D’Arthur, a cue for Irwin to pull apart and rebuild the Arthurian legends.
Irwin occasionally mixes registers, from the pseudo-historical “sturdy rogues” to the present-day “the crowd went wild”, and a whip-wielding lady is known as Dame Discipline. This may not enable the reader to fully engage with the characters emotionally, but he has gone full-throttle on the metafiction engine. The real Woodville supposedly composed a poem before his execution in 1483 in which he lamented the “unsteadfastness” of the world, and in that vein, Irwin strives hard to unsettle the reader.
What you might term Blackadder moments pop up every now and then. Here is a description of a goblin hunt in Wales: “The little creatures resembled humans so much, particularly Welshmen, that it seemed cruel to kill them, but we did and cut off their ears for tally.” Burglars in London attach candles to tortoises and insert them into properties they hope to ransack. If they don’t hear someone say “What is a tortoise with a candle on its back doing in my house?”, they know no one’s home and they can proceed. There are also some scenes of grotesque horror that would make George RR Martin green with envy.
Wonders Will Never Cease isn’t quite as out-and-out comic as Irwin’s last novel, Satan Wants Me (1999), which charted the disappointments of an aspiring Satanist in swinging 1960s London, but it has more intellectual meat. The novel is a sort of marriage between AS Byatt and Terry Pratchett: one you can enjoy greatly on the first reading, but which will be even better second time round, as it’s so densely packed with learning and allusions. This is a lightning trip around 15th-century culture, European culture and indeed world culture; if you didn’t know Irwin was a scholarly man, you’d be convinced of that by the end of the book, and of his outstanding abilities as a novelist. Bravo.
• Tibor Fischer’s Good to Be God is published by Alma. Wonders Will Never Cease is published by Dedalus. To order a copy for £8.19 (RRP £9.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
