Hild by Nicola Griffiths

I remember reading another review of this book, years ago, probably not long after it came out. That reviewer found the prose almost unendurably turgid, and I remember reading the sample she'd given and shuddering in agreement. Still, when Hild popped up on one of my lists, I still figured I'd give it a chance, although I was ready to give it up more quickly than I might in other circumstances. When I sat down to read it, though, I found that I had little trouble sinking into the prose and reading. It was just difficult enough that I never lost awareness that I was reading, but not so difficult that I tossed the book aside.

This is going to be a review of damning with faint praise, I'm afraid. This book was better written than I was expecting, but what got me was the plot. This book took an awfully long time to get where it was going, and I'm still not sure it knows. It read to me a lot like an author writing to find out, writing around her topic to flesh out the world for herself, doing the work on the page that authors frequently do in their heads, to make the world pop into life.

Unfortunately, all those long sections that don't seem to be there for any real purpose other than to explore some other small piece of medical life are all in this book, and this is a long book. It's not that she's wrong about anything - the research, as far as I can tell, was very well done. And it's exhaustive.

And it is all, all, on the page. On many pages. On page after page after page. It's hard to ding a book for completeness, but oh my goodness, there were so many sections here that felt like they weren't necessary in the final product, as necessary as they might have been for the author to root herself in the setting. It takes so long to get anywhere, and while it's hard to pick out quite which moments could have been trimmed away, it does feel like this could have been so much shorter.

If what you want to read is a very slow trek through medieval life if you're part of a royal family, in a world where who is in power changes frequently, and go with agonizing detail through the years of young Hild's life, in the years before she founds a sanctuary and becomes St. Hilda, before she becomes Christian, when she's seen as a prophet to the king, and grows tall and learns to fight, and card wool, and spin wool, and travel with the retinue, and endure all the politicking of twenty years in minute detail...well, that's what this book is.

It's not terrible. It's just too much, like the author couldn't tell the difference between what was important and what wasn't, and so presents absolutely everything like it's the same level of urgent. There's no real sense of forward momentum of the plot, no sense that we're driving towards anything, because it's all moment to moment, and even in Hild's life, it's hard to tell which thing is most important to her. We know all the things that are important, but even those seem to have such an even distribution of interest and passion that it's hard to parse them out.

I'm good with complex. I am. I like meandering. But this story doesn't seem to know what it is, and where it ends up, there's never a moment where it feels like anyone was in any real danger, even though Hild as a character certainly thinks that there is danger around every corner. But the story is weighted down by so many details that her urgency doesn't come across on the page.  I made it through the more than 700 pages. I didn't hate it while I read it. But I have no interest in finding out what happens on every day after to Hild, not if every day is given the same attention they get here.