‘The King at the Edge of the World’ by Arthur Phillips (2020) – 265 pages

In ‘The King at the Edge of the World’, Arthur Philips tells a rollicking story that takes place during the reign of Elizabeth I in England.

The time is 1601. Elizabeth I has had a long peaceful and productive reign and has grown old; now her health is rapidly declining. Who is going to follow her to the throne? According to the traditional royal lineage, next in line to follow Elizabeth to the English throne is James who is already King James VI of Scotland. However James is the son of Mary Queen of Scots who was put to death by Elizabeth in 1587 for Catholic plotting against the English throne. There is widespread concern among the English nobles that James might have Catholic beliefs. This would be the perfect time to send a spy up to Scotland to find out the truth about James: Protestant or Catholic?

Nearly all the royal families in Europe at that time were fervent Catholics. The Pope and other Catholic royalty across Europe were constantly plotting and conspiring to return England to the Catholic Church. The English already had a terrible experience with their earlier Catholic ruler Mary I, Bloody Mary, who had had 280 Protestants burned at the stake.

Geoff Beloq runs a network of secret agents for Queen Elizabeth to uncover and foil secret Catholic plots against the Queen. It is his mission to determine whether or not James is a Catholic.

Extracting James’ religious views is a necessarily delicate operation, one that is suited for neither a Protestant or a Catholic, so Beloq recruits a well-educated Muslim doctor, Mahmoud Ezzedine, from the Ottoman Empire who got stuck in England through no fault of his own.

“There was something amusing, and reassuring, in his foreign perspective: He was unlikely to be led astray by emotional confusions.”

Dr. Ezzedine has a Muslim perspective on Christian doctrine:

“And now, to distinguish between Christian madmen? This one is confused because he kneels or does not, or reads Latin or does not, or trusts his priest to perform the magic bread spell or does not. Therefore this fellow or that one must be burned alive.”

James I of England

Although ‘The King at the Edge of the World’ would fall into the category of historical fiction, it is on the wild, creative, and unpredictable side of historical fiction. It uses the real historical backdrop of Elizabethan times to tell a fanciful frequently humorous tale.

Arthur Philips is an imaginative enthusiastic storyteller whose each novel is vastly different from his others. I have read and enjoyed all his work and will be looking forward to his next.

Grade:   A