David Greig’s The Book of I is such a thrill to read it can cause pangs of guilt in the eager gobbler of its words. It almost feels like an indulgence.
Because what’s not to like? The year is 825, and the blood-lusting Vikings aboard Helgi Cleanshirt’s long ship – Buttercock, Bloodnose, Chin-Slitter and Ghost Axe, to list the names that are barely printable in a family newspaper – are landing on the breezy shores of I, also known as Iona, a Hebridean island off the west coast of Scotland, to perform their brutal biannual raid and massacre.
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Iona is about five kilometres long and 1.5 kilometres wide, “made of rock, sand, machair, bog, stone, sod and pasture. A low hill, a boar’s back, rises in its breast. On the west side, winds and waves batter the rocks, on the east, tranquil, sheltered beaches. The north is mostly pasture and garden. The south is rough and wild.” The writing’s all like that: speedy, tight, precise, faintly mocking of its own intentions.
Among the hurt-causers is Grimur, an aging Norseman who can’t keep up with the others and wonders whether he even needs to carry his heavy axe: He is losing his enthusiasm for slaughtering human beings.
Grimur extinguishes the island’s blacksmith with a jut of his dagger and a smash of his shield, but then falls unconscious, dead drunk, after imbibing too much of the delicious mead proffered by his victim’s wife. He is thought to be dead and is buried alive by his Viking brethren. Meanwhile, the blacksmith’s wife – who, it turns out, is happy to be rid of her abusive brute of a husband − hides among her beehives from the marauders.
The other survivor of the Viking raid is young Brother Martin, a devout Christian monk – but not yet devout enough to long to meet his maker at the edge of a Norseman’s sword. He conceals himself in the community latrine, to his deep and stinking shame.
The rest of the book (132 action-packed pages) is the story of how the three survivors gradually forgive each other and join forces to (maybe) survive Helgi’s next raid. Violent, funny and rooted in history, the novel is as spare as a whippet and just as fast-moving.
All of which sounds like a zesty new (or very, very old) category in the publishing game: a version of romantasy, but for men.
Romantasy is the wildly popular TikTok-driven subgenre of romance novels in which a love story plays out in a fantasy setting. By the estimate of websites that track romance books, they account for a majority of current sales in independent bookstores, and an 18-per-cent slice of The New York Times bestseller list over the past two years.
The genre is packed to bursting with mythical creatures, magical realms, idealized (i.e. non-realistic, sometimes superpowered) characters, Harlequin-style sex – either “open” (explicit) or “closed” (fade to black) – and writing that is often compelling but sometimes so clichéd you could hammer nails with it.
Every society invents the entertainments it needs. Romantic fantasy novels have been around for decades but began selling in eye-popping numbers during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term – a stretch of time, it has been theorized, that lacked for chivalry and heroes and idealistic behaviour. Other critics have postulated that romantasy is popular because it’s faster-paced, more readable and less snooty than “sophisticated” literary fiction.
Women allegedly make up an 82 per cent of romantasy readers, but men are reportedly reading the stuff more and more – at a time when fewer and fewer men are reading books at all, even in their preferred category of non-fiction, where sales last year were flat or down.
Is there a genre of fiction that might appeal to men in the same rapturous way romantasy appeals to women? The Book of I could be the prototype. It boasts all the elements of a romantic free-for-all any guy could love. Let us list them now.
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For starters, it is violent, so much so that the violence becomes satire. Male readers tend to like violence: Books about war and sports (war minus the shooting, George Orwell said) have always been popular with men. This is especially true when the violence is committed by someone with a working brain and a sense of humour; in other words, by someone admirable.
As chubby but clear-sighted Grimur slogs his breathless way up the steep shores of the island to massacre its inhabitants, he is at least grateful that “it was a nice day for it: light breeze, lambs playing in the fields. You didn’t want to be splitting heads in the rain.” He’s a likeable assassin. Romantasy specializes in the type.
Point two: The Book of I is fiction, but it’s also rooted in actual history, traditionally another favourite subject of male readers. (There’s a famous joke among publishers: The most popular straight men’s magazine ever published would be called Tits & Hitler.)
It is a chronicle of Iona, an isle in the Hebrides where the real-life Irish missionary Columba (later sainted) landed and established a monastery in the sixth century, after setting out from Ireland to spread Christianity across the British Isles, especially among the Picts. Columba, who is sometimes known as the Picts’ patron saint, was an evangelist and a poet and also, obviously, a lunatic.
Viking raids on Ireland, England and Scotland were a regular feature of medieval life, and many of the acts and words of the Norsemen in The Book of I are rooted in real lore and practices. Is it too fantastical that Helgi Cleanshirt “killed small children by tossing them up in the air and catching them on the end of his sword”? It is not. The non-fiction Vikings liked to cut out the nipples of Christian Pict kings they killed, as a message to their followers that the leader would no longer be a source of succour.
Point three: David Greig, the 57-year-old Scottish author of The Book of I (which was published in Britain in 2023 under the uninspired title Columba’s Bones), is a prolific playwright and screenwriter, which explains the book’s rollicking dialogue. Romantasy seethes with dialogue.
Point four: The subgenre is also characterized by fierce tribal and emotional rivalries. The Book of I has them too, notably between the Vikings and the Christian monks, the so-called “godfish” whose private devotion to something other than their own appetites is incomprehensible to the materialist Vikings.
Abbot Blathmac urges his flock to let the Norsemen behead them – “Today we will leave the bitterness of life and step into the infinite bliss of God’s eternal grace” – so they can meet their Maker. But “this ostentatious display of humility stirred [Helgi’s] sadism. Did they think they were better than him? Did they think they were special? Very well, he would be specially cruel.”
It’s the oldest story ever told, barbarians versus know-it-alls, but repackaged into an exciting, often hilarious story, to take the edge off its seriousness.
Point five: The Book of I speaks to its intended audience’s collective concerns. Almost all romantasy revolves around tropes modern women experience: overbearing superiors, enemies who become lovers and vice versa, rejected loners who discover new belonging and – always – strong heroines whose previously undiscovered talents help them survive trials and intrigues and come out on top. The books appeal to a gender that has been denied access to power.
These days, however, it’s impossible to pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading a story about the plight of modern men and boys – males who have been cut out or left behind, whose status has been diminished by progress and the rise of others. They too are ripe for fantasy that takes them out of this world. (That’s why the NFL exists.).
They can certainly understand an anti-hero like Grimur. “He knew that everything he would ever achieve had been achieved already. Each task he undertook, he felt less capable than last time. ... He was bored of wit, tired of politics and no longer appeared to be of interest to women.”
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Away from the conforming influence of his Viking bros after they leave him for dead, Grimur lets go of the illusion that he is all-powerful. He comes to admire Brother Martin as the young Christian weirdo makes amends for his cowardice in the cludgie by praying over the graves of the dead, and he begins to regret the people he killed.
Not that Grimur is about to become a Christian. As Helgi observes: Christianity “was like berserker piss. You drank it, you felt special, then you woke up three days later naked in a forest with no memory at all of how you got there.” But Grimur is intrigued by the possibility of change. And transformation is the DNA of romantasy.
Point six: What finally transforms our hapless hero, as all romantasy heroines and heroes are transformed? A love story, of course. Between the unachievable purity of Brother Martin’s world – the world of the sanctimonious, where someone is always right and someone else is always wrong – and the all-too-fallen violence of Grimur’s past (where only might makes right), Grimur finds the mead-maker, Una.
She starts out as his enemy (a big romance trope), and is interested in neither an otherworldly Christian God nor men killing each other to reach Valhalla. Una finds pleasure in the practical here and now: She gets up and goes to work and deals with what she has to deal with, all the while foraging for the ingredients that go into her magic – magic! – meads. Greig’s tick-tock diction makes them sound delicious: “pine, wine, sea, peat, dandelion, a little fermented apple ... some bitterness, maybe a trace of regret.” Show me that bio-dynamic wine and I’ll drink it.
Una falls for Grimur after she watches him coax and milk a wayward cow. It sounds – well, it sounds like a scene out a fairy tale, in keeping with our new-found genre of male romantasy. She seduces him; sex happens but is not described, unlike a lot of women-directed romantasy, which is all flaming members and seething honeypots and way, way more. Una helps transform the Viking from the brutally fierce, always dominant hero a man is supposed to be, as defined by the orthodoxies of his age, into the emotionally freer, less defined but evolving human being most men want to be. They spend a lot of time lying around after sex, cracking jokes.
It’s only when Helgi reappears that Grimur’s transformation is threatened, and not without a sacrifice. If that isn’t a saga trope, it certainly conjures up Homer’s Odyssey – the ultimate romantasy. “Grimur didn’t want to go to Valhalla. He wanted to go to Una. He wanted to spend eternity in a cow-warmed cottage drinking mead and laughing at jokes.”
Standard female-oriented romantasy, of course, is set in a make-believe world – magic castles, slaves turned superheroes in outer space, you name it. (Sports-related romantasy is the latest trend.) It seems logical that, given the slight predilection male readers have always had for non-fiction, for stuff that actually happened, romantasy for lads would be more grounded in reality. And so it is: One of the standout qualities of The Book of I is that its tale of medieval strife feels so relevant today.
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We live, remember, in an era bracketed by two extremes. At one end is heightened gratuitous cruelty – as when ICE officers shoot mothers point blank in the face through the windshield of their cars. At the other is superenhanced self-righteousness – that of, among others, the ultrawoke, who will tell you what you ought to think and believe, and what kind of cancelled scum you are if you don’t.
Pathological Helgi, like sociopathic Trump aide Stephen Miller (“we live in a world that is governed by strength, force, power”), like the holier-than-thou monks and the sanctimonious far left, are all moral extremists. They believe only one point of view can be true at the same time.
Grimur, Una and Martin don’t have the luxury of such stark and impractical convictions. The former enemies have to figure out a way to get along, beyond the brute force of the Vikings and the moral disdain of the turn-the-other-cheek Christians. They have to make room for each other’s fragilities and strengths, for the way people actually are, and not just the way we want them to be.
They’d like to be left in peace to make the best life they can, given their circumstances. Wouldn’t we all? These days, alas, that sounds like a real fantasy.