March 2025 – Blood and Porridge

March 31, 2025April 1, 2025

Getting trollied with Banksy

A while ago, my partner and I, plus a friend, paid a visit to The Art of Banksy: Without Limits, an exhibition showcasing the work of the world’s most famous pseudonymous street artist, political activist and general agent provocateur. The exhibition is currently showing at the Fever Exhibition Hall on Singapore’s Scott’s Road and contains more than 200 Banksy-related artworks, prints, sculptures, photographs and film-clips.

Our Without Limits experience began ominously because we arrived there at the same time as several busloads of teenaged pupils from one of Singapore’s international schools. Not only were there a lot of kids crowding the place, but they were all carrying bags and backpacks – this happened in the afternoon and, presumably, they were heading straight home after their visit – which added to the congestion. But to be fair, though these kids were a distraction by dint of their sheer numbers, they were nowhere near as annoying as they could have been. They could have affected a bored, I’m-too-cool-for-this air of nonchalance – behaved liked stereotypical teenaged prats in other words. (I should know. I was a stereotypical teenaged prat once myself.) However, most of them seemed to take a genuine interest in what was displayed around them.

Indeed, I heard some intelligent conversations among them. For example, beside a reproduction of one of seven murals Banksy had done in Ukraine in 2021, showing a little girl upending an adult, judogi-clad martial-arts expert, one young lad explained to his mate how it represented Ukraine’s resistance to the invading, and supposedly vastly superior, forces of Russia. (Putin, of course, claims to be a black belt in judo.) When I saw those throngs of kids at the exhibition’s entrance, I had fears I might end up doing an impersonation of Victor Meldrew. Thankfully, I had no cause to do so.

If you live in the United Kingdom, as I have on and off, you’ll have become accustomed to stories about Banksy and his exploits surfacing now and then in the media: for example, about him circulating fake ten-pound notes bearing the face of Princess Diana; or opening a deliberately-shite theme park called Dismaland Bemusement Park; or having a work fed through a shredder at the very moment it sold for a million pounds at Sotheby’s Auction House. However, I found Without Limits informative because it was the first time I’d seen all these incidents gathered together and given a narrative. The dots had been joined up, creating a proper overview of the guy’s career.

So, having viewed this exhibition, what conclusions can I draw about Banksy? Well, I can’t deny his flair for taking well-worn British symbols and icons, the sort of things you’d see in a London souvenir stall, and subverting them. That’s subverting them in a mild, almost tourist-friendly way so that nobody is offended. Thus, you get a sculpture of a collapsed, partly-folded red British telephone box; or a picture of Queen Elizabeth II sporting Ziggy Stardust’s jagged red-and-blue lightning flash from her brow to her jawline; or one of a Household Cavalryman atop a fairground-carousel horse that’s attached to a giant spring; or one of Winston Churchill with a green Mohican hairdo (actually based on a real incident in 2000, when a May Day protest led to a strip of green turf being plonked on the head of Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square). And, generally, there are plenty of Union Jacks and images of British bobbies on show.

Secondly, I note Banksy’s keen eye – and perhaps perverse love – for the tawdrier aspects of life in 21^st-century Britain: what I like to think of as ‘crud Britannia’. This is represented, for instance, by a picture where one of those poor guys frequently seen on Britain’s decaying high streets holding a sign with an arrow and the words GOLF SALE finds himself in front of the column of tanks that advanced on the Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989; or one set in a crumbling English seaside resort where a pensioner sits on a bench oblivious to a circular saw eating its way through the promenade towards him.

Britain’s biggest supermarket, Tesco, may not be pleased to learn that it’s a recurring motif in this regard. There’s a picture where some 1940s, Enid Blyton-style English kids stand to attention by a flagpole, from which a plastic Tesco bag flutters; some Andy Warhol-esque prints of soup cans, only these are cheapo ‘Tesco Value’ ones; and some simple designs where prehistoric, cave-painting figures are shown with shopping trolleys (Tesco ones, no doubt).

And thirdly, you won’t miss Banksy’s leftwing and anti-establishment politics, though of course cynics would argue that by marketing his leftwing, anti-establishment artwork so cannily and successfully, he’s actually thrived in the capitalist system, and its attendant power-structure, that he supposedly disdains. The hardest-hitting work on show is Napalm, a stencil piece showing Phan Thi Kim Phuc – the little girl in Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph The Terror of War, seen running and screaming with severe burns after US forces napalmed her village during the Vietnam War – flanked by and having her hands held by Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald. A similar Vietnam-War theme appears in Happy Chopper, wherein a US military attack helicopter is depicted with a giant, pink ribbon below its rotors.

Also anti-establishment is Banksy’s obsession with putting riot policemen in jokey, ironic and disempowering positions. You get a picture of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz having her basket searched by a thuggish-looking law-enforcement officer; one where a massive cop in armoured combat gear is made to stand splayed against a wall while a little girl in a pink dress frisks him; and a sculpture of a policeman’s head, encased in a helmet that’s been fashioned out of a discotheque mirror-ball.

Without Limits wasn’t perfect. It ran out of steam in its later stages, which I found rather repetitive. Certain key Banksy images appeared again and again… And there’s only so many times that you can look at that Banksy rat, or that masked bloke in the act of throwing a bouquet of flowers, or that little girl with a balloon on a string, without crying ‘Bor-ring’ in the voice of an annoying, nonchalant teenager. Also, I wasn’t impressed by the exhibition shop. I’d seen many cool things that afternoon, but disappointingly the merchandise on sale sported only a few very basic and very familiar Banksy images.

Nevertheless, for the most part, I found Without Limits engaging and entertaining and I’m happy to give it a thumbs-up. Incidentally, if you’re in Singapore and haven’t seen the exhibition yet, you’d better get a move-on – for it ends on April 13^th.

March 28, 2025March 31, 2025

My safe space

The world is in a terrible state at the moment. It’s apparently morphing into a real-life version of the scenario imagined by George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), wherein the planet is divided into three authoritarian superstates, Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania. We now have Russia run by Vladimir Putin, China run by Xi Jinping, and the USA run by the grotesque triumvirate of orange gobshite Donald Trump, viper-in-hillbilly-form J.D. Vance, and the chainsaw-wielding, ketamine-popping, Seig Heiling, superrich super-dickhead Elon Musk. All three countries have been open about their territorial ambitions, about their wish to expand and become real-life, continent-engulfing equivalents of Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania. Very bad news if you live in Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states, Taiwan, Panama, Greenland or Canada. Pretty bad news for the rest of us.

Thus, in these troubled times, it’s a relief to have a safe space: a little cubby hole you can retreat to, and hide in, and where your brain can function removed from all the awfulness happening outside for a while. For me, that space is provided by the Flying V bar, Singapore’s self-styled ‘heavy metal headquarters’, which is hidden away in a back corridor in the basement of the Adelphi Shopping Centre on the city’s Colman Street. Actually, the shopping centre is next door to the National Gallery, which makes the Flying V an ideal spot to sit with a beer after a visit to the gallery and ruminate on all the artwork you’ve just experienced.

A Singaporean shopping centre may seem an incongruous place to find a heavy metal bar. However, it isn’t the only music or metal-related business in the Adelphi. On your way there, you pass a few units containing shops that sell vinyl records, many of the heavy-metal variety.

Inside, the walls of the Flying V are slathered with old posters and flyers advertising heavy-metal bands, concerts and festivals. Even if you don’t touch a drop of alcohol, you can spend a pleasant hour in the place just reading the items crammed over the walls and enjoying the little glows of nostalgia they kindle in you. On my part, for example, I gave happy sighs when I discovered an Art Nouveau-inspired poster for the mighty space-rock band Hawkwind, designed by the graphic artist Barney Bubbles; a picture of the late, great Ronnie James Dio tricked out in sword-and-sorcery gear, as was Ronnie’s wont to wear; and a poster for the much-missed Motörhead on their 1980 world tour, promoting their greatest-ever album Ace of Spades.

On the other hand, when I took my cat-loving partner there, she was delighted to find this proclamation about the feline species emblazoned on the wall behind our table.

The Flying V’s drinks menu includes a beverage called Trooper Premium British Beer. Trooper’s vivid label-design gives you a clue as to who produces it. Yes, it’s the result of a project involving veteran heavy-metal band Iron Maiden, singers of such anthems as Number of the Beast (1982) and Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter (1990). The latter song will always be close to my heart because of the fact it knocked Cliff Richard’s sanctimonious Saviour’s Day (1990) off the coveted Christmas Number One slot in the 1990 British singles chart. The band produce Trooper in partnership with England’s Robinson’s Brewery. So, if you spend an afternoon getting sloshed on the stuff in the Flying V, you’re not being wasteful or unproductive. You’re actually helping to fund Iron Maiden.

As I’ve said, the world is in a dire state just now and it sometimes feels tempting to retreat into the Flying V and hole up there for good. However, the place does contain a warning against staying on the premises for too long. You might end up like this guy.

March 19, 2025March 19, 2025

Eggers’ banquet

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) has finally reached Singapore and a few days ago I watched it in the city-state’s excellent arthouse cinema The Projector. This is Eggers’ reimagining of the 1922 silent horror-movie classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, which was directed by F.W. Murnau and based surreptitiously on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula – though not so surreptitiously that Murnau and his producers escaped being sued by Stoker’s widow for breach of copyright.

The new Nosferatu has provoked some extreme responses. The reaction has been as polarised as the weird relationship at the film’s core, wherein the beautiful, fragrant Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) gets intimate with the gaunt, rotting, pustuled Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), the dreaded nosferatu – vampire – of the title. A while back, I read a very positive review of it by Wendy Ide in the Guardian but was taken aback by the negativity of the some of the comments below the line: “A turd…” “Just awful…” “Absolutely terrible…” “Beyond boring, absolute crap…”

Well, I lean towards the Wendy Ide end of the Nosferatu debate because I thought the film was great. At least, I thought so during the two hours and 12 minutes I sat before it in The Projector. When my critical faculties started to function again – they’d been in a daze during the film itself – I became aware of a few flaws. But generally, thanks to its atmosphere, its visuals, its sumptuous (if drained) palette and its overall craftsmanship, I found it the most impressive version of Stoker’s novel I’ve seen. And yes, though it retains the original Nosferatu’s German setting and German character-names, this is essentially another retelling of Dracula.

Not that I’m saying it’s my favourite version of Dracula. That accolade belongs to the 1958 Dracula made by Hammer Films, directed by Terence Fisher and starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as Dracula and Van Helsing, which I saw when I was 13 years old. 13 is a formative age, when certain things tend to imprint themselves on your consciousness and become your favourites for life. Also, I feel uncomfortable saying this Nosferatu is better than Murnau’s Nosferatu. More than a century separates the two films, with huge differences in their historical contexts, themes, styles and filmmaking technology, and to me they’re like chalk and cheese. That said, I noticed some of the flaws in Eggers’ Nosferatu when I did compare it with the old one.

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

While we’re on the subject of comparisons, I should say I massively preferred this film to the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola one, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Despite having the peerless Gary Oldman in the title role, it was one of the few films I’ve come close to walking out of in a cinema. I stayed the course in the hope it would improve in its later stages, but it didn’t. Eggers’ Nosferatu is as operatic in its tone and as flamboyant in its visuals as Coppola’s Dracula. However, while Coppola threw everything at the wall – restless camera movements, gimmicky special effects and make-up, over-the-top costumes, hammy performances – in the hope at least some of it would stick and hold the attentions of the raised-on-MTV teenagers he assumed would be the film’s audience, Eggers doesn’t merely show off In Nosferatu. There are also moments of stillness and silence, of subtlety and holding back, of allowing atmosphere to ferment and ripen. Actually, for my money, comparing it to Coppola’s Dracula is like comparing a moody and detail-laden work by a Dutch Master to a hyperactive kids’ cartoon.

Nosferatu’s storyline follows the Dracula template. Young estate agent Thomas Hutter (the stand-in for Stoker’s Jonathan Harker, here played by Nicholas Hoult) is despatched from the fictional German port-city of Wisburg to a castle in Transylvania, where he has to supervise the paperwork for the purchase of a Wisburg mansion by the mysterious Transylvanian aristocrat Count Orlok. Hutter’s sojourn in Orlok’s castle becomes a terrifying ordeal as he discovers the vampirical nature of his host. He ends up plunging from one of its windows, into a river, while the Count sets off for Wisburg.

The Count’s chosen mode of travel is by ship – Romania, which Transylvania is part of now, borders on the Black Sea and Germany’s coast runs along the North and Baltic Seas, so this is evidently a long voyage – and he brings with him a horde of plague-carrying rats, which first destroy the ship’s crew and then start infecting the citizens of Wisburg when he reaches his destination. These plague-rats are both a physical manifestation of Orlok’s evil and, presumably, a way of disguising his activities – with people dropping dead of plague left, right and centre, nobody’s going to notice a few blood-drained corpses.

But Orlok’s presence has been felt in Wisburg long before his arrival there. Hutter’s wife Ellen – the Nosferatu equivalent of Stoker’s Mina Harker – has had an inexplicable psychic link to the ghoulish Count since her childhood and has already, in her dreams, pledged herself to him. Also, Hutter’s boss Knock (Simon McBurney) has been communing with Orlok via some occult rituals. Sending Hutter off to Transylvania was clearly part of a plan to relocate the vampire to the feeding-grounds of Wisburg. Knock is the film’s version of Milo Renfield, the asylum-inmate who in Stoker’s novel becomes Dracula’s disciple. Accordingly, Knock goes insane, gets incarcerated, escapes and does Orlok’s bidding in the city. Meanwhile, the thirsty Count makes a beeline for Ellen and those around her…

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

Eggers’ cast-members acquit themselves well. Lily-Rose Depp is extremely impressive in a role that requires her to be frightened, helpless, yearning, lascivious, possessed and defiant – often a couple of those things in one scene. As a female foil to Dracula, she’s as good as Eva Green’s character Vanessa Ives in John Logan’s gothic-horror TV show Penny Dreadful (2014-16). Likening someone to the mighty Eva Green is big praise from me.

Playing Jonathan Harker in a Dracula film is a thankless task. You have to be bland and bloodless enough to add spice to the forthcoming dalliance between your missus and the Count, to suggest she’s a desperate 19^th-century housewife who might actually welcome the vampire’s kiss. But you also have to be interesting enough to make the audience root for you while you’re trapped in Castle Dracula. And Nicholas Hoult does what’s required as the Harker-esque Hutter. His restraint contrasts with the silent-movie acting of the original Hutter, Gustav von Wangenheim, who spent the early scenes of the 1922 Nosferatu grinning like a maniac.

On the other hand, Simon McBurney is unnervingly off-the-scale as Knock. The 1922 Knock, Alexander Granach, was off-the-scale too, but McBurney’s one is allowed to slather himself in some full-on, 2024-stye blood and gore. (He follows the hallowed Renfield tradition of chomping on small animals.) If there’s a criticism, it’s that he doesn’t get enough to do. More on that in a minute.

Ralph Ineson and Willem Dafoe respectively play a beleaguered Wisburg physician, Dr Sievers, and a Swiss expert on the occult, Professor Von Franz, who correspond to Stoker’s Dr Seward and Professor Van Helsing. When Hutter gets back to Wisburg, they team up with him to put a stop to Count Orlok’s onslaught. Willem Dafoe won’t replace Peter Cushing in my affections as the ultimate cinematic Van Helsing, but he’s delightful as the eccentric, cat-loving Von Franz. Kind old gent though he is, Von Franz concocts a plan to destroy the vampire that may have tragic consequences for the people he’s supposed to be protecting.

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

As for Bill Skarsgård and the film’s depiction of Count Orlok… I can see why it’s been controversial. Some have been disappointed that Eggers and Skarsgård didn’t replicate the iconic look of actor Max Schreck, who played the Count in 1922 as a bald, gaunt creature with rodentlike incisors, Spock ears and unseemly tufts of ear and eyebrow hair. Indeed, in the first part of the film, we hardly see Orlok. During the scenes set in his castle, he’s unsettlingly obscured by a haze of firelight, candlelight, shadows and darkness. But when Eggers’ cameras finally reveal him, he’s an icky, mouldering thing, from the neck down at least, and he sports a monstrous and frankly distracting moustache.

I know Dracula had a moustache in the novel, and certain actors have played him with one, such as John Carradine in the Universal movies House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), and Christopher Lee in Jess Franco’s Count Dracula (1970). But this must be the droopiest, shaggiest Drac-tache ever.

Maybe Eggers avoided the Max-Schreck look because he was sensitive to the accusations of antisemitism that dogged the old Nosferatu – that Schreck’s Orlok played on common German stereotypes and caricatures of Jewish people at the time. Or maybe he just decided that look had become too much of a cliché. As well as a slap-headed, pointy-eared vampire featuring in the previous remake of Nosferatu, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1977), similar ones have appeared in the 1979 TV version of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, the original film version of What We Do In The Shadows (2014), and Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II (2002), where the leader of the baldy-vampires was played by Luke Goss. (Yes… a Bros-feratu.)

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

It’s also debatable if Eggers and Skarsgård made the right choice for Orlok’s loud, guttural voice, which booms out of the screen like the Voice of the Mysterons from Gerry Anderson’s TV show Captain Scarlet (1967-68) with a Slavic accent. At least it’s different… And Skarsgård put a lot of work into creating those vocals, training with an Icelandic opera singer and even studying Mongolian throat singing. But I actually found Yorkshireman Ralph Ineson’s deep, gruff, north-of-England tones more menacing, even though his character, Dr Sievers, is one of the good guys. (Sievers must have had a medical practice in Leeds before moving to Wisburg.)

Elsewhere, not a great deal happens during the second half of the film, though Dafoe’s charming performance keeps us engaged. The latter part of the 1922 film is enlivened by a sub-plot involving Knock, who gets blamed for the mayhem in Wisburg after Orlok’s ship arrives. Believing him to be the real vampire, the townspeople pursue him through the streets and the surrounding countryside, in scenes that are still impressive today – Knock perched like a gargoyle atop a vertiginous rooftop, for instance, or the mob mistaking a distant scarecrow for him, rushing at it and tearing it to pieces. Eggers removes this sub-plot, however, and Knock (who in the original film didn’t even meet Orlok physically) serves as a conventional vampire’s acolyte. If nothing else, this gives the Count someone to transport his coffin from the Wisburg docks to the mansion he’s bought. In the 1922 Nosferatu, he suffered the indignity of having to carry the coffin himself.

So, the film drifts somewhat later on and I’m not fully convinced by its portrayal of Count Orlok. But overall I really enjoyed Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu. It’s a feast – an Eggers’ banquet – of gorgeousness, gloom, sensuality, repulsiveness, grue, humour, absurdity and tragedy. It has fabulous visuals, entertaining performances and a smart balance between the aesthetically pleasing and the grotesquely yucky, meaning it should satisfy both cerebral arthouse types and horror-movie aficionados more interested in blood, gore and plague-rats.

And I can’t understand why some people disliked it so much. This Nosferatu isn’t Dross-feratu, it’s the Absolute-boss-feratu.

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

March 10, 2025

Bernard Cornwell’s (still the) King

A while ago on this blog, I enthusiastically reviewed Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King (1995), the first volume of his Warlord Chronicles. These books are his take on the King Arthur legend, which he tells in a manner closer to the reality of the Dark Ages than most other interpretations of the legend. As a gift last Christmas, my partner kindly bought me the second and third volumes of the Warlord Chronicles, Enemy of God (1996) and Excalibur (1997). Here are my thoughts on Enemy of God, which I’ve recently finished reading.

Enemy of God’s framing device is the same as The Winter King’s. In the sixth century, an elderly monk called Derfel is writing down the history of King Arthur at the behest of the young Queen Igraine, who’s obsessed with the Arthurian tales she’s heard. As a young man Derfel knew Arthur and became one of his most trusted warriors. A theme in the books is the tension between messy reality and fanciful legend. Derfel’s version of events frequently disappoints Igraine, accustomed to hearing much more romanticised stories about the king. At one point she tells him, “There are scullions who know how to tell a tale better than you!” Derfel fatalistically assumes that Igraine, later, will doctor his writings and make them more compatible with the legend.

The Winter King ended with Arthur triumphing at the Battle of Lugg Vale, a contest brought about by his own foolishness in backing out of an arranged marriage to Princess Ceinwyn of Powys, which massively offended her father, and wedding instead the more alluring but also more calculating Guinevere. Enemy of God continues Arthur and Derfel’s story by detailing three more major events in their lives.

Firstly, Derfel takes part in Merlin’s ongoing quest to retrieve some relics that according to legend were given to the ancient Britons by the old pagan Gods, are known as the ‘Treasures of Britain’ and will, Merlin believes, restore Britain to the golden age it supposedly enjoyed before the arrivals of the Romans and, more lately, the Saxons. Specifically, they go hunting for a magical cauldron that’s hidden on the island of Ynys Mon (today the Welsh island of Anglesey) off the coast of the kingdom of Lleyn, controlled by the vicious Irish king Diwrnach. Secondly, Arthur marshals the warriors of most of the Briton kingdoms and sets off to dislodge the most powerful Saxon king, Aelle, from the east of the island – a campaign that eventually brings him to Saxon-controlled London. And lastly, Arthur finds himself facing a rebellion in his home kingdom of Dummonia. The rebels have incited the Christian community to rise against the pagan one there, with Arthur unjustly portrayed as the oppressive, Christian-hating pagan-in-chief, i.e., the ‘Enemy of God’ of the title.

Along the way, Derfel finds happiness with Ceinwyn, the woman Arthur spurned in the previous book, and they start a family together. He also makes a troubling discovery about who his father is. Arthur, meanwhile, learns some hard truths about certain people close to him whom he’s loved or, at least, been willing to give the benefit of the doubt to. That Mordred, the boy-king of Dummonia, for whom Arthur has been acting as the kingdom’s lord-protector until the lad reaches manhood, turns out to be a wrong ’un is the least of the book’s surprises.

From wikimedia.org

A couple of things make Enemy of God feel different from its predecessor. Firstly, Christianity is portrayed much more negatively here. In The Winter King, the Christian Britons co-existed peacefully alongside the pagan ones, and the Briton kings had priests as well as druids in their entourages, ensuring them the support of both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Gods. This harmoniousness was embodied in the character of the affable and loyal Bishop Bedwin, but Enemy of God bumps him off early on. Thereafter, the only sympathetic Christian character is Sir Galahad, who’s so decent and broad-minded he even lends Merlin a hand in his quest for the pagan cauldron.

Amusingly, Cornwell portrays the Christians’ activities, wailing in tongues, flagellating themselves and generally behaving hysterically as the year 500 AD draw nears – likely, they believe, to be the year when their Saviour returns to the earth – as immensely disturbing to the pagans. They react to the Christians’ shenanigans with as much distaste and fear as modern bourgeoisie Christians have reacted to the many loopy religious cults that have sprung up during the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

A second difference is that we get far more of Merlin in this book. In The Winter King, he didn’t show up until page 282, more than halfway through. I was slightly critical of how he was deployed in the previous book’s plot. I wrote that “…the manner in which Merlin reappears undermines the narrative, because it’s all a bit too unlikely. A couple of times, the cunning old wizard pops up out of nowhere and saves the day. He might as well just whip off a Mission Impossible-style rubber face-mask / disguise and go, ‘Duh-dah!’” This didn’t sit very comfortably with the book’s attempts to treat the Arthurian legend with non-fantastical seriousness.

Merlin’s still something of an issue In Enemy of God, though here it’s to do with how he manages to suddenly revitalise himself. At different points he seems to be at death’s door, or to have lapsed into senile decrepitude, but then he stages startling comebacks. He’s like Doctor Who regenerating when his old body is about to die though, unlike the TV Time Lord, Merlin doesn’t actually transform into someone new.

Still, Cornwell’s Merlin is an immensely engaging character and he gets the best lines. While telling Derfel what a lion is, and describing one he once saw in Rome, he remarks: “It was a very unimpressive threadbare sort of thing. I suspected it was receiving the wrong diet. Maybe they were feeding it Mithraists instead of Christians?” When he goes on to talk about a crocodile, and Derfel inquires what that is, he explains, “A thing like Lancelot.”

It’s more difficult to breathe life into the character of Arthur. There’s a danger that his very worthiness will make him seem two-dimensional and dull. However, Cornwell mostly avoids this trap by highlighting the character-flaws that spring from this worthiness: naivete, gullibility and – paradoxically – being so in thrall to his sense of duty that he becomes villainous. This last thing is illustrated when Cornwell weaves the tragic, chivalric romance of Tristan and Iseult into his narrative. Here, the loving but doomed couple incur the wrath of King Mark of Kernow and Arthur feels duty-bound to side with Mark, even though Tristan has helped him in earlier campaigns. When this ends horribly, Derfel is so disgusted with Arthur that he shuns him for a long time afterwards.

It’s surprising to read a book written almost 30 years ago, and set roughly 1500 years ago, and find elements in it reminding me of 2025. But Enemy of God does this in different ways. Living in an era of Trumpian fake news, often transmitted by social media, I found myself smiling ruefully at Derfel’s accounts of how the weaselly Lancelot propagates a false image of himself, one brave and virtuous, by getting the bards to sing songs in praise of him around the countryside. And after Derfel falls out with Arthur, he goes to those bards and pays for “a dozen songs about Tristan and Iseult that are sung to this day in all the feasting halls. I made sure, too, that the songs put the blame for their deaths on Arthur.”

Also pushing fake news are the Christians. At one point, a Christian magistrate called Nabur is executed for treason: “These days, of course, he is called a saint and martyr, but I only remember Nabur as a smooth, corrupt liar.” Later, Arthur has to fight off an ambush in a squalid Christian settlement in the mountains of Powys, led by a filthy, wild-haired fanatic called Bishop Cadoc. This also gets the Dark Ages equivalent of being reported on Elon Musk’s X: “They say that Arthur surprised Cadoc’s refuge, raped the women, killed the men and stole all Cadoc’s treasures, but I saw no rape, we killed only those who tried to kill us, and I found no treasures to steal – but even if there had been, Arthur would not have touched it…” Obviously, “Cadoc was elevated into a living saint…”

It’s also interesting to view Enemy of God through the prism of 2025’s Britain, when Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform Party is rallying its supporters with chants of “We want our country back.” Although Merlin is a very appealing character overall, it’s not difficult to see parallels between his mission to restore the old pre-Roman Britain and the nostalgic British nationalism peddled by Farage. Ceinwyn, who’s quite enamoured with Merlin, gives a startlingly Farage-like speech at one point: “When I was a child… I heard all the tales of old Britain, how the Gods lived among us and everyone was happy. There was no famine then, and no plagues, just us and the Gods and peace. I want that Britain back, Derfel.”

On the other hand, Arthur evokes a more forward-looking – dare I say inclusive? – Britain. Early in the book, he rejects Merlin’s vision of the island, saying: “This isn’t the old Britain… Maybe once we were a people of one blood, but now? The Romans brought men from every corner of the world! Sarmatians, Libyans, Gauls, Numidians, Greeks! Their blood is mingled with ours, just as it seethes with Roman blood and mixes now with Saxon blood. We are what we are, Derfel, not what we once were…” Arthur might be the greatest hero of British legend, but Farage’s Reform Party wouldn’t want to cite Cornwell’s version of him in their campaign literature.

In nearly every respect, Enemy of God is as good as its predecessor. The only area where I think it pales a little in comparison to The Winter King is its ending. Whereas the first volume ended with the bang that was the Battle of Lugg Vale, this volume is slightly anti-climactic. Cornwell was presumably more concerned with manoeuvring his characters into position for the third and final volume than with finishing the second instalment with a bang similar to the first’s. This is, to be fair, a problem that has beset many a middle volume in many a trilogy. However, with everything else about Enemy of God so captivating and entertaining, I’m happy to overlook that slight shortcoming.

And so, in the near-future, I’ll hopefully get to grips with Excalibur…