Q: Dance of Death (Hardcover)

I am unsure how a reader without knowledge of the 40 years after Luther's protest in 1517 would sustain their interest in the complexities of the text. I hope that the book won't be merely for the historically initiated, but I fear that it will. The authors certainly do themselves no favours by the layout: an unnecessarily spread out 600 plus pages make the book more daunting than it should be. The opening too is off-putting, jumping about pointlessly from one early event to another. However, by the time the narrative settled down into a more straightforward format in Part Two, I was hooked.

The horrors and disappointments of the Kingdom of Munster in the 1530s are brilliantly, even cinematically, depicted as the central narrator, a man of many names, sees his dream of a communal society (as they often do) descend into mayhem and carnage reminiscent of the end of Apocalypse Now. As the story goes on, the other ways in which he seeks to bring down the social order, including defrauding the banks and spreading subversive literature, seem more compelling elements than the race to uncover him and his relationships with other characters. This is, as the dust jacket proclaims, a "Novel of Ideas".

There are weaknesses to the book. The female characters seem only to serve to "sex up" the text (literally) and are universally blandly attractive: the narrator seems to fall for all of them, disappointing because there were many more interesting women around in early sixteenth century Europe. The writers (and translators) of historical fiction have to struggle to convey a fitting vernacular for their period. Liberal doses of four-lettered words seem particularly lazy in this period (when they would have been meaningless as swear words) and in the mouths of these characters.

Nevertheless, this is compelling and skilfully woven together - the idea of someone reappearing in all the hotspots of trouble in a troubled half-century, themselves reconstructed viscerally and believably, is plausibly presented. The parallels with the problems of our own time, particularly the control of challenging ideas, movements and information, have refreshed my enthusiasm for the sixteenth century.

Perhaps part of the problem is that in Britain our only knowledge of Renaissance history is Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Little are we told (either in school or in the history prgrammes that now swamp the TV schedules) that, prior to Napoleon, British history is if anything a sideshow to the main event in Europe and often not even that.

This is a huge, sweeping epic of a novel that explores, among other things, the religious fervour which swept the continent in the decades after Luther's Protest, the brutality of the Inquisition, the in-fighting that gave rise to a separate Protestant church, the nature of class struggle and revolution, the rise of mercantilism and the manner in which politics was practised in a pre-democratic era. All this and more is weaved into the fabric of a gripping plotline and is told in a narrative style that brings alive the sights, sounds and smells of a continent dragging itself out of the Middle Ages.

Read on Olly, you've missed one of this year's best publications!