I
finished Between Two Fires recently. I seem to be on a bit of a medieval kick currently -- I'm also readin the Brother Cadfael mysteries, detective stories set in a twelfth century abbey. Some people think about the Roman Empire, I think about high medieval Christendom.
Between Two Fires was pretty remarkable. I kept expecting it to falter, and it kept staying extremely high quality, even improving. One of my favorite parts about it was its literalness Someone once described the film The Witch as the sort of movie that the actual colonial protestants depicted in the film would make had they the technology and storytelling chops. In the movie, there's a witch, she's evil, the devil tempts various members of the family, and leads to their downfall. The witch isn't secretly good but misunderstood, she's not a metaphor for trauma, her destruction of the family is not strictly merited (whatever the failings of its members), it's a straightforward fairytale, in a sense. Between Two Fire accomplishes a similar thing. The Boschian devils feel drawn from the medieval imagination, the cosmological framework in which they operate has no traces of modern irony; and there's a very literal, and frightening, depiction of Hell that is extremely effective. The author doesn't go out of his way to make the characters' dialogue feel medieval, but his treatment of the divine and diabolic orders feel "period" in a very satisfying way, and I commend him for it.