© Penguin Books
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 20th and 21st 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.
© Cartwright Hall Art Gallery / Bradford Museums & Galleries
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…
© Michael Joseph / St Martin’s Press