Book review: Sprawling mosaic of speculative history
When a reviewer’s oldest friend publishes their first novel, it puts said reviewer in a potentially sticky spot from which there is only one satisfactory release: you need to like the book. What a relief, therefore, that Heresy Alpha, Warren’s sprawling mosaic of a speculative history manages to combine unforced and unaffected erudition with deft world building and a plot fast and intricate enough to keep the reader eagerly turning pages.
I had to keep the introduction to this review short because Heresy Alpha has a lot going on. It’s 2003, but not as you would remember it, since this is a timeline in which the Virgin Mary descended to save Byzantium in 1453, resulting in a pivot away from Christianity (adherence to which becomes the Alpha Heresy of a new moral code) to the Marianism that gives its name to The Marian Imperium that now governs the territory of old Byzantium. Don’t worry; there’s a map.
Within the technologically advanced theacracy of the Imperium, Warren situates seven central characters, each loosely representing one of the deadly sins, whose stories interweave. We have Marcus, the once noble – at least by his own estimation – soldier turned bureaucrat, attempting somewhat haplessly to govern Caledon (Scotland), a land that evidently is not keen on being governed.
Marcus’ wife Hypatia, meanwhile, puts into practice her maxim, ‘She was a Greek, after all. Pederasty was tradition’, in her role as a dean at the university of Mystras. Down in Thebes, a young female military commander and ex-protégé of Marcus’, Agnes, leads her troops into an ominous and ill-fated raid, only to be first distracted and then rescued by the vision of a little girl in white. An inadvertent victim of Agnes’ career, a grizzled cop in Ravenna tries to balance his sense of duty with the rage that fuels him after his family were inadvertently murdered by Agnes’ zealous excesses.
In the Russian branch of the empire, the young prince Vadim attempts to break free from the strictures of his family, while his Vestal cousin sacrilegiously lusts after him in her imagination. And in a bleak reimagining of the Vatican as high-security prison, a chubby ingrate is mysteriously targeted by Marian military on the day of his 18th birthday and has to flee.
Because of its ambition, there are moments of plot condensing that make some weighty but not unmanageable demands on the reader’s suspension of disbelief. However, given that ambition, it is impressive that Heresy Alpha sweeps you along not just by its pacing but by the fact that Warren makes each character relatable and engaging, even if we will need to wait for the later instalments to see them all fully realised. It’s a wait whose ending this reader, at least, anticipates impatiently.