cover image On the Bright Road

On the Bright Road

N. P. Figgis, Paddy Figgis. Marion Boyars Publishers, $14.95 (250pp) ISBN 978-0-7145-3057-4

A fusing of modern narrative and 6th-century Welsh myth, Figgis's (The Fourth Mode) new novel is a psychological reading of medieval armies clashing in the millennial mind. Cathal Kerr, a 20th-century Welsh everyman who believes he is about to die, leaves his wife, Gemma, and retreats into the wilds near his cottage, which he finds to be possessed by the spirits of the country's past. Kerr's home is situated along the Bright Road, running north-south in western Wales, where, according to Arthurian legend, pitched battles were frequently fought during the Dark Ages. Seen through the eyes of Kerr and the Tracker, a woodsman who oversees the Bright Road, a dark myth-filled cosmology unfolds, in which King Arthur is not the storybook creator of the Camelot Round Table but rather the least ruthless of many violent forces. As Kerr battles sickness and confusion and socializes with the old men and priests of the region, he is also confronted with the ghosts of his ancestors battling the irrational rages of a darker time. Or was it really a darker time? As his story progresses, Figgis suggests that either we ""moderns"" are in a new Dark Age or that every glamorous Camelot is built on cruel realities. Struggling through all this psychological and historical turmoil, Kerr draws closer to the Central Tree, a powerful physical and metaphysical symbol of the Celtic root of sanity and tradition. A dark, often maddeningly impenetrable survivalist tale of agony and ecstasy, Figgis's novel is uniquely modern and yet as familiar as the British Isle themes of Thomas Hardy and the Anglo-Saxon ""Seafarer."" (Feb.)