John Larison’s The Ancients is set in the far future – “two hundred and thirty-one generations” from now, to be precise. It is a gritty and compelling novel, with beautiful yet flinty prose combining expansive world-building with characters full of heart.
The book starts dramatically, with three siblings living on a remote farm by a lake having to leave for more secure surroundings when their parents don’t return from a fishing trip. Their arduous trek through the mountains is just the beginning of their travails, as the American author interlinks a narrative involving their mother – captured and sold as a slave by raiders, and the story of a young man in a dying and primitive city run by an uncompromising emperor.
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The visceral nature of the storytelling is the key to The Ancients’ strength, a powerful and muscular prose style perfectly dovetailing with a brutal and hardscrabble world. There is a mythical nature to some of the narrative, an elemental power that drives the reader along with the troubles and grim determination of the wonderfully drawn characters.
Themes of endurance and love run through The Ancients like rare metals, along with the idea that the kindness of strangers is all that’s needed for us to keep our humanity, and for people to prosper. This juxtaposes against a grimness at the depressing predictability of some human behaviour, the idea that men will always seek to grab and hold on to power, no matter what. All of which makes The Ancients a powerful and moving novel from a writer in total control of his story.
The Ancients by John Larison is out now (No Exit Press, £10.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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