West Oversea: A Norse Saga by Lars WalkerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
"West Oversea" follows Father Aillil, the Irish hero of Lars Walker's previous book, "The Year of the Warrior", as he travels with his Norwegian lord, Erling, across the sea to Greenland.
Adventures ensure, including a long and feud-filled stay in Iceland and a storm-tossed journey to the New World, but they do eventually make it to Greenland - sailing northeast rather than northwest.
This is a Christian novel, and of the best sort. You don't pick up a Lars Walker novel to find an idealized world - in this book not only is there violence, war, and death, there's also real sin, real sorrow, and - perhaps most surprisingly of all - real demons, real magic, and real gods.
But only one God. This novel is set at the time of the Christianization of Scandinavia, and while Walker's telling of that story is fantastic in the most literal sense of the word, the struggle between the old spiritual loyalties and the new felt very realistic to me.
And all of that is just the theme! Even if you took that all out, you'd have a fascinating adventure tale, full of swash-buckling, and sea-faring, politics, romance, and quest. Add in the powerful spiritual element, and you simply have an excellent story, well-told, and edifying. Which is an odd thing to say about an adventure tale. But you can say it about this one, because it points the eye toward Christ.
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