The Evening of the World, by Allan Massie

The Dark Ages: a spiritual caper with a twist

Can we ever find a fulcrum for this tottering world? Does it lie in religious assurance, sexual gratification, the exercise of power, the pursuit of honour or simply in a confirmed, sedentary scepticism?

All these possibilities abound in Allan Massie's novel about the Dark Ages, The Evening of the World, and the result is a funny, sad, exuberant and richly told tale of a quest for no one knows quite what. There is a pitfall here, though: writers are too easily seduced by the idea that confusion is somehow an artistic virtue, when a study of chaos can quickly become chaotic.

Massie "discovers" a manuscript. Uh-oh, I think we've seen this before. But this particular "manuscript", written by Michael Scott, tutor to the future emperor Frederick, "the wonder of the world", is couched in the form of a homiletic book of instruction, a genre popular in the Middle Ages and one which was to reach its dubious apotheosis in Machiavelli's The Prince.

This is probably the most consistently convincing device in the book. Convincing because the lessons that the author asks the prince to draw from this story are invariably at odds with the author's avowed desire to impress upon his pupil a sense of order in the world.

Yet there is no order in the world he depicts. Pilgrims turn into fallen angels, emperors are either morons or sybarites, 14th-century Cathars are found in fifth-century Byzantium, incense takes the shape of beautiful girls and boys, shimmers and vanishes, there is more faith to be found among pagans than among Christians. Everything is in giggling flux. For some time the reader feels that he is astride the pen of an illuminator, sliding slowly into a beautiful book of hours, where different ages and worlds jostle in a shrinking, jagged landscape.

We are in the fifth century AD. The Goths are poised to sack Rome, the world is not yet Christian, nor any longer pagan, the Huns are on the rampage, the West is ruled by the dissolute, cowardly emperor Honorius while real power has passed to the Eastern emperor in Constantinople. A young man named Marcus, descendant of emperors, and, more modestly, of angels, is summoned to Milan, the seat of the Western empire.

So begins a story in the tradition of Voltaire's Candide: an ingenuous hero, moved by the noblest of motives and the most human of desires, meets angels, ghosts, mysterious chatelains, empresses and the Wandering Jew himself. Marcus finds himself slave and emperor in quick succession.

With his companions, Lycas, a "lost boy" from a community of pagan innocents, Artemisia, Marcus's cross-eyed wife, who shows up the superstition and prejudice of the age by her unexpected and moving selflessness, and Sir Gavin, a mad Falstaffian knight from Yorkshire and the book's most loveable character, Marcus finds himself shunted from Italy to Constantinople to Greece and back again. He is bound by honour to fulfil his commission to Honoria, sister to the Western emperor, only to find in the end that she has made her own bargain with the changing, and savage, forces that now rule the world.

As his journey lengthens, so its purpose fades. In his mingling of genres, Massie almost creates a new one: the spiritual caper. Halfway through, I was left wondering when Michael Caine was going to make an appearance, uttering the immortal lines: "Thou wast only enjoined to blow the bloody doors off!"

The author knows his craft, so his historical mistakes are all deliberate – deliberate, that is, until the last 50 pages, whereupon his otherwise beautifully crafted prose descends to an amateurishness which left my eyes bulging. In the end, having seemingly run out of myths to mingle and pilfer, he simply ships his characters out of the Mediterranean so that he can get eclectic on his readers somewhere else.

"You can't trust them barbarians," says one character, "they even shit in spirals, they're that devious." A helpful image for this book. Allan Massie has followed the downward spiral of the Dark Ages with his customary and delightful mix of assiduity and playfulness, but his story suffers from having nothing really at stake – a serious fault in a work which purports to investigate such a deeply troubled and frightening time.

Perhaps we should simply watch this space and hope that, as this epic gathers momentum in the novels which are to follow, Massie is able to prove to us that he is truly swallowing swords and not just dancing on doughnuts.