The Book of Kells

Love this book. John Thornburn, a rather vague and migrane prone Newfoundland artist, has been picked up and whisked to Dublin by his autocratic girlfriend, Dr Derval O'Keane Phd, professor of Irish studies at Trinity College. The only things John likes about Ireland are Derval, who pushes him around rather a lot but is good fun, and Celtic art, which he loves with a consuming and profitless passion.

When John somehow opens a gate into tenth century Ireland he and Derval are drawn into the struggles of Ailesh Inion Goban whose home has been destroyed by a Viking raiding party, and into the complex politics of a country where the King of Dublin is named Olaf Sigtryggson, where the Irish Church is still very much its own entity not yet show more brought into orthodoxy with Rome, and where a Brigid who is not entirely a Saint nor entirely a Goddess may yet still be encountered in the hedgerows on a rainy night.

In the twentieth the people of the tenth may be just history, but through the gate John and Derval find themselves increasingly caught up in the lives of people who are anything but academic abstractions. That's the best part of this book, the wonderful noisy, smelly, poetic, angry, passionate people baking bread and building ships and taking sweatbaths and stealing cattle, and murdering and demanding blood price and singing laments and illustrating manuscripts. show less

This book takes the inexplicably spacey artist John Thornburn and his weirdly shrewish lover Derval back a thousand years in Irish history. The characters are sincerely annoying, and the plot pacing is not quite there, but the historical research is detailed and fascinating. There is a nice balance between fantasy and realism, and it features one of my favorite things, The Book of Kells. If you can put up with characters you want to slap and you have a real passion for all things Irish, I would recommend this book. If you just want to read a good story, look elsewhere.

I remembered the actual Book of Kells to playing a bigger part than it did in this story, but I still love the adventure in 10th cent Ireland - it holds up just as well after I've spent a few years in the SCA discussing dress and life of the period, which makes it among the better researched historical novels. Characters, plot, settings are all interesting and well done and it just keeps moving.

A time-travel fantasy set in modern and Viking Ireland.

Artist John Thorburn has settled in Dublin at the invitation of Professor Derval O’Keane after she met him in Canada. He is ineffectual and vapid, only taking fire with his art. She is competent and decisive and takes him as one of her lovers. While copying the spirals on a reently discovered Celtic cross, while playing some Irish music, he creates a portal back to Viking Dublin and brings teen-aged Ailesh through. She is a survivor of a Viking raid on the monastic community she and her father reside in. John and Derval take her back in time and discover another survivor, Labres McCullum, an ollave.

An interesting take on time travel, more in the style of the accidental traveller show more than the super-competence usually in evidence in such works, it reads more like a fantasy than a S F novel, given the action is mostly set in the past.

Recommended. show less

I originally bought this because it involved time travel to medieval Ireland, things that really twigged my interest at the time. But I have re-read it many times because I so enjoy the characters that MacAvoy lovingly draws. Even the bad guys get a full sketch; no one important to this story gets short shrift.

I have loved historical fiction since I was a young one back (as my sons would tell you) in the Middle Ages. I have for the most part shied away from Fantasy/Scifi, finding it too much of a stretch.

But this book may be the one that changed my mind. The characters were distinct personalities, well drawn, and very real. The descriptions of place, realistic enough to believable, and the cultural references whether 10th or 20th Century, in keeping with those of the Irish immigrants living in my Bronx neighborhood. The plot kept me turning the pages.

The only fault I can find is that I got lost in the Gaelic terms, only some of which I was aware of. I eventually found a glossary -- at the end of the book. I wish I'd found it sooner, and show more probably would have had I been reading a hard copy rather than an ebook (and I had read the Table of Content).

Be that as it may, this was a fun read and definitely recommended. show less

What happens when a doofus professor gets sucked back in time to the moment when The Book of Kells is first written?

He gets a migraine, that's what.

Then he winds up fighting Vikings, rescuing damsels in distress, helping sailors wormproof their vessels, and he even gets involved in a lawsuit.

Richly evocative descriptions, engaging characters and a storyline full of pain, beauty, hope and love.