But sometimes it’s nothing like that at all. Sometimes you return to a book and find that it’s better than you remembered, better than you had hoped: all the things that you had loved were still there, but you find that it’s even more packed with things that you appreciate. It’s deeper, cleaner, wiser. The book got better because you know more, have experienced more, encountered more. And when you meet one of those books, it’s a cause, as they used to say on the back of the book jackets, for celebration.

So. Let’s talk about Votan.

I’m really late in getting this introduction in, mostly because I’ve been trying to work out how to introduce Votan without giving it all away. One does not want to explain the jokes, nor does one feel the need to assign homework before one gives someone a book to read. But it will not hurt if you are familiar with your Norse myths. They will make Votan a deeper book, a game of mirrors and reflections and twice-told tales. It might be a good thing to read The Mabinogion, and the Irish Táin. They will make you smile wider and shake your head in wonder when you read Not for All the Gold in Ireland.

So. First of all, you should feel free to skip this introduction and go and read the book. You are holding a beautiful book here, written by a remarkable writer: it contains three novels. Two novels about a Greek trader called Photinus, who is at least the equal of, and, dare I say it, a finer rogue and tale-spinner than George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman; and a darker retelling, or re-creation, of a Welsh epic poem.

I read them as a young man—they were republished as fantasy novels in the early eighties, having been published in the sixties as historical novels. They are not fantasy novels, nor are they strictly historical novels: instead they are novels, set in historical periods, which people who read fantasy might also appreciate. The Photinus novels (there are only two, with a third novel implied but, alas, never written) are based on mythic and magical stories. (Men Went to Cattraeth is bleaker, and based on an old Welsh poem, the Y Gododdin.)

Photinus’s mind and his point of view, his voice if you will, is not ours. It is this voice that lingers longest for me. His attitudes and his world are those of the past. Occasionally he commits atrocities. He does not have a twenty-first-century head. Many characters in historical novels are us, with our point of view, wearing fancy dress. Votan’s dress is rarely fancy. The conceit that all protagonists in historical novels should share our values, our prejudices and our desires is a fine one (I’ve used it myself), and it is much more difficult and much more of an adventure to create characters who are not us, do not believe what we believe, but see things in a way that is alien to us and to our time.