Byzantium

Peter's Review

Byzantium was a departure from Lawhead's earlier works—but an exceedingly pleasant departure. As a teenager, I fell in love with Lawhead's writing through his science fiction, was reintroduced to the fantasy genre through his Dragon King Trilogy, and found an Arthurian legend that "clicked" with me through The Pendragon Cycle, so I was a bit worried that I'd be disappointed with a non-fantasy [*] historical fiction; though worried with a ray of hope, given the historical realism and believability that Lawhead put into his other works. As I quickly discovered, the worry was quite unfounded and the hope yielded a hundred-fold crop.

Aidan was an ordinary monk, who left on an extraordinary pilgrimage. He knew where he was coming from—a life secure in his faith, living in the comfortably-Christian world of his monestary—and believed he knew where he was going—thanks to a prophetic dream. Through misfortunes, struggles, and pain, Aidan came to doubt that God's path for him was good, that he was even on God's path, that God even cared about him.

As a character, Aidan resonates with me more than any other Lawhead character to date. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that when it first came out, I was at a similar spiritual place as Aidan: I had left my safe home environment, and was struggling with who God wanted me to be in the "real" world. It was a comfort to me to see God's leading and path in Aidan's life, even if he couldn't, thus giving me encouragement that, even if I couldn't see it at the time, maybe God really was still directing and guiding me.

If I have any complaint about the book, it's that it is too short: yes, the readers see the completion of the physical pilgrimage, but we get shortchanged on the spiritual journey; Aidan's return to faith is glossed over in the epilogue with an "in the intervening years, he eventually returned to his faith"-type paragraph.

Despite the abrupt ending, I still rate Byzantium as Lawhead's strongest and best-written story, and it ties with Dream Thief as my favorite Lawhead novel.

[*: Due to it's portrayal of prophecy being real, some have categorized Byzantium as "fantasy"—especially when combined with the Quest-nature of the book. However, since I believe prophecy is an actual part of our world, and being a Quest (without other elements of the fantastic) is not enough to make a story a fantasy, I cannot agree with that categorization.]