Those familiar with Holland’s oeuvre will already be acquainted with his extraordinary talent for fusing gripping story telling with historical narrative and his latest work, Dominion proves no exception. Poignant vignettes of saintliness and sacrifice coalesce with visceral anecdotes of barbarism, fanaticism, revolution and slaughter as the narrative sashays its way through the epochs before arriving at its post-modernist terminus.
... as a Muslim I concede I’m perhaps not best placed to adjudicate dispassionately. As with In the Shadow of the Sword before it, the dark blemishes of the author’s prepossessions and confirmation bias – the bane of genuine historical enquiry – maculate the pages of Dominion. Holland began his career as a fiction writer, and one gets the feeling it is a field he has never fully abandoned. The need to entertain, to shock and to inspire pathos vie with historical accuracy and balance, the hallmarks of academic disquisitions, but it’s to the former the author invariably lends greater weight. Given the commercial considerations of publishing houses (dry, factual, analytic history books don’t sell in the tens of thousands) it’s an understandable methodology but then the reader should be aware that popular history constitutes a very different genre to its academic counterpart.
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As is too often the case when it comes to such topics, Holland is guilty of telling only half the story and of carefully curating the facts for his readers.
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Personally, I have difficulty buying into the idea that post facto expressions of remorse for cold blooded acts of depravity are in any way exculpatory or even remotely mitigatory. Whenever the West’s supposed “universal love” ethic has collided with the exigencies of dominion (pun intended) it has always been the former that has given way to the latter.
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If the ascent of the West could be traced back to a single moment in time, then it would surely be the day a German priest and professor of theology (of then minor repute) nailed his dissertation reproving the sale of indulgences to the door of All Saints’ church in Wittenberg. And even if the anecdote itself might be apocryphal its after-effects most certainly were not.
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Modernity, as we understand it today in a Western European context was not bred then from the marrow of Christian thought as much as it was an escapee from it. It represented the penultimate stage in a long process of releasing the metaphysical bindings which had for so long held people in thrall. When Nietzsche declared God to be dead he was declaring in effect, that every man (and woman) was henceforth their own god. It is a message that in the one hundred and twenty years since his passing has found widespread acceptance across Western Europe. While, as Holland points out, Nietzsche had lamented that Christianity’s sternutatory pollen still afflicted European noses back in the late 1800s, were he a witness to our current post-modernist era I suspect his mood would be far more upbeat.
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I began this review by lauding Holland’s literary talents and with Dominion he has delivered, in a manner only he can, a thoroughly captivating tale, bursting with the spirit and energy of its protagonists, and one guaranteed to hold its readers in thrall until the very final page. Superbly written in his distinctive punchy style, one senses an almost hymnal rhythm to the prose, punctuated by occasional ribaldry and with a soupcon of dry English wit. Holland’s rich mélange of humour, solemnity, horror and poignancy is served with an elegance few writers could hope to emulate. And as the West grasps for meaning in the age of agnosticism and atheism, Dominion provides, for those willing to look beyond the façade, a revealing insight into the perturbations of its intelligentsia. As a work of literature, it is as sublime as it is enchanting. As an intellectual thesis it is singularly unconvincing, fatally undermined by the obvious prepossessions of its author. That it will be warmly received and embraced with alacrity by its target demographic, I suppose is a given. But in the end posterity will be the judge of whether the idea it propounds succeeds in taking root and bearing fruit.
Posted by MASKED AVENGER on AUGUST 16, 2020
[Ok, so I've finally published my musings on @holland_tom's latest book Dominion (it was recently released in paperback). It's long (9700 words) but of all my blog posts over the years I really do recommend you read this one.] https://t.co/24lzETkuKY
