The Stonehenge Legacy
by Sam Christer
Sphere pp496
ISBN-13: 978-0751545180
I should confess at the outset that I am an archaeologist. Don’t let this scare you.
While conspiracies about archaeological sites or ancient people are very unlikely to curry favour with me, I am not devoid of humour or the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction. Sam Christer’s The Stonehenge Legacy is firmly fiction and does not pretend to be anything else. If you want to read about the (real) wonder that is Stonehenge, I suggest Stonehenge by Julian C. Richards or, if you want to go deeper, the comprehensive Stonehenge Complete by Christopher Chippindale.
Mr Christer’s book is fiction inspired by prehistory, a genre that done right can be an entertaining read. Done badly, it will either make you laugh or cry. Mr Christer’s premise is an ancient secret society that still guards the stones today. Human sacrifice is an added bonus. Of course it’s been done many times, so originality is hardly a feature of this book.
Thrown in the mix is a female police inspector who is busy juggling single parenthood with a career and the usual assortment of police types. The problem is that not a single character is the least bit engaging or believable. It’s as if Mr Christer picked every bad stereotype from endless police-themed books and TV shows, flung them all in one book and neglected to give them any substance whatsoever.
It is very hard to engage with a book when the characters are caricatures. The man who starts it all, Nathaniel Chase, is a very pedestrian version of an inept Indiana Jones – he makes a fortune looting artefacts (and not in Nazi Germany but in the present) while also being a Cambridge don. To the outside world, Cambridge University may have many peculiarities but employing traders in illicit antiquities is most definitely not one of them.
Chase is also immensely rich and owns a sprawling mansion (in reality the majority of us struggle to pay the rent and the only sprawling we get is when we fall face down in the snow). His son, Gideon, is a more legitimate type of archaeologist who was estranged from his father. On his father’s death he inherits the spectacular house and riches and, to his horror, finds out that his father was a member of a very weird cult with a penchant for human sacrifice. The idea was, I guess, for him to infiltrate the cult and save the world and the daughter of the Vice President of the United States, an even more unbelievable character who is embroiled in this mess.
I am not in the least bit annoyed by secret cults and human sacrifice as these are entirely appropriate topics for fiction. My annoyance is directed at the incredibly poor plot and even poorer writing. The book is written in the present tense. I point blank refuse to consider this a valid technique, especially in this genre. It’s lazy and it makes me think that the author did not quite grasp the fundamentals of English grammar. The reader is unable to get a sense of time, especially when events which happened last week and a few thousand years ago are both described in the present tense in the same sentence. Coupled with a constant stream of pointless adjectives and dubious metaphors, the end result is anything but compelling.
Fiction based on archaeology does not have to be like this. I could go on about Robert Harris or Lindsey Davis, who has written an entertaining series based on the (fictional) Roman detective Marcus Didius Falco. Or we could all look closer to home and turn to John A. Bonello and his It-Tielet Qamar and L-Aħħar Ħolma, two beautiful pieces of fiction which leave the reader entirely enchanted. Even if the reader is an archaeologist.
• Ms Vella Gregory is an archaeologist. She strongly believes that our heritage should be safeguarded and celebrated.
This book is available at Word for Word.