Amida: A Novel (Paperback)

The story - a vastly outnumbered band of heroes attempt to hold the fort until reinforcements arrive - is a classic archetype which has done sterling service down the ages and Mark Walker's variation on the tale has all the action, adventure, honour and sacrifice which might make it appeal to Hollywood. Think of Gladiator and Braveheart in a siege situation.

But Walker's work is more serious than these, painstakingly striving to avoid the revisionism of putting modern attitudes in the hearts and minds of ancient characters such that the book has the feeling of age in every sense. Amida feels like an old fashioned book. One written not with the breathless pace of a modern blockbuster - though the narrative is exciting enough in places and the book is certainly compelling once it gets going - but one deliberately and carefully constructed using the voices of earlier centuries.

Just for instance as many Victorian novels unfolded as a series of letters and journals, so does Amida. We hear the voices of the garrison commander, his military rival, his lover in letters and military reports reflecting on recent events or on their own past lives. If the effect of this is to give the book a sometimes distant, once removed character - there is a sense in which certain key events happen "off stage" only to be reported on later - it also adds to the feeling of antiquity, that this events are remote and lost in time. Likewise the use of multiple voices well represents the different faiths and philosophies of the time, Christianity being given an all too rare fair representation alongside pagan beliefs, which are for once not fashionably romanticised and glamorised. Old fashioned but always relevant themes of honour, piety and loyalty are central to the tale.

Some may consider Amida crosses uncomfortably into fantasy, or belongs under a heading of "magical realism" for its inclusion of household deities and the spirits of the departed as characters in the narrative. What Walker is doing is certainly nothing so post-modern as "magical realism" and nor is it strictly fantasy, though it may be fantastical - there are supernatural characters interacting with the living in Amida as a natural reflection of the world views of the characters in the story. To them the supernatural is a natural part of the world and gods and the newly departed are as essential to the narrative as they were to Homer. Remove such elements and the result would be half the story, as in the recent film Troy.

In kin with that film, and the aforementioned Gladiator and Braveheart, Amida delivers on the action front with several detailed, apparently well researched and startling epic battle sequences. Followers of grand scale ancient combat will be well satisfied by the military set-pieces, while the plot builds to a powerful climax building a sense of inevitability and impending doom, all the while offering hope and taking unexpected twists so that little quiet works out as imagined. Clichés are set-up only to be subverted, though some may find the resolution of one central rivalry anti-climatic. Nevertheless, for those who have grown-up with the likes of Quo Vadis, Ben Hur, Spartacus and other larger than life adventures Amida offers a refreshingly multifaceted and thoughtful vision of the ancient world. A highly commendable first novel.