slowly, although for a historian such
a hinterland was clearly a gift. The process
was accelerated when he discovered
a second-century Atlas of Roman Britain,
showing that even then, this same area was
a buffer zone between competing tribes.
He discusses the intriguing if highly
speculative theory that the King Arthur of
legend was a Roman centurion called Arto-
rius, who led resistance to a powerful Scot-
tish invasion around 180 AD. As described
by the chronicler Cassius Dio, this was the
biggest war fought anywhere in the Roman
Empire during that time, and while a near
catastrophe for the Romans — the Scottish
got as far south as York — it was a forma-
tive event in the birth of a united British
nation of the north.
A previous book by Graham Robb was
about the Celts, and he remains a strong
revisionist supporter of their true worth.
Far from being ‘the tartan-clad warriors
of ancient Britain who skulked in smoky
huts like people of the Stone Age, liv-
ing on porridge, roots and beer’, he sees
them as much more advanced. They had
towns and roads, high-speed transport
and well-managed farms. They also used
metalworking techniques which have yet
to be reinvented.
Julius Caesar’s self-serving depiction
of the British Celts as wild, druid-led and
needing governance is one that still needs
constant rebuttal, so deeply has it sunk
into the popular imagination. Quite what
Graham Robb would make of Jez Butter-
worth’s current ‘feral Druid’ series Britan-
nia, which could have claimed Julius Caesar
as a co-scriptwriter, goes unrecorded. But
one can only imagine angry puffs of smoke
coming out from his remote farmhouse if
he has installed the Sky satellite dish.
Few archaeological voyagers have
returned after venturing into the track-
less mosses of Celtic history and Arthuri-
an legend with their reputations intact. It is
a measure of both Robb’s scholarship and
enthusiasm that he does so with some brio.
Some of his esoteric investigations of
map interpretation or Arthurian place-
names might have been better served up as
appendices for the more dedicated reader.
But the book is at its best when he bicycles
with the speed and ferocity of a Scottish
reiver through these lost flatlands of history.
And it seems on further investigation
that the cattle reivers were not quite as
fearsome as might appear — or at least
Robb, as he goes native, slowly becomes
more sympathetic towards them. Most
inhabitants of the Borders, he claims, would
only go on one raid in their whole lives as
some sort of act of initiation — ‘that glori-
ous hectic day when grandfather earned the
right to be called a man by burning down a
Tynedale barn or making off with a Cheviot
farmer’s sheep’.
That said, in the space of a decade in the
1580s, a total of 123 houses were burned
by more than 2,000 reivers in seven sep-
arate raids. Only 11 of them died, says
Robb. And adds that ‘by comparison with
medieval sporting events, reiving of the
traditional variety was a remarkably safe
activity.’ So that’s all right then. Although
presumably it wasn’t quite such a safe activ-
ity if you were inside the house that was
being burned.
Raiders from Scotland cross the border to steal cattle
The bread of life
Johanna Thomas-Corr
Sourdough
by Robin Sloan
Atlantic Books, £12.99, pp. 259
Sourdough has all the ingredients of a truly
despicable work of fiction. Novels about
food are awful, aren’t they? Especially
novels about baking; they’re the absolute
worst. Sourdough is not only a kooky sat-
ire inspired by that bread they sell for £6.50
down the farmers’ market – it’s set in San
Francisco, the smuggest city in the world,
with a cast of Tesla-driving techies and Kim-
chi fetishists and anthropomorphic yeast.
Oh, and the book’s author, Robin Sloan, is
a former Twitter employee.
But just as it would be churlish to deny
that, mmm, £6.50 bread is kind of tasty, so
it’s hard to deny that Sloan has an inventive
way with a story. Imagine HBO’s Silicon
Valley meets Little Shop of Horrors with
elements of Greco-Roman hadal mythol-
ogy and magical realism, all rendered in the
easy, chatty tones of chick-lit.
Lois Clary is a software engineer from
Michigan who is drawn to the Bay Area to
work for General Dexterity, a robotics com-
pany with ambitions to change the world
(‘We are on a mission to remake the condi-
tions of human labour, so push harder, all of
you.’). The money is good but she sleeps on
the office sofa, her hair is falling out and her
only friends are her listless colleagues who,
like her, subsist on ‘fully dystopian’nutritive
gel called ‘Slurry’, plus four geriatric women
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