On Palm Sunday, 1461, the Wars of the Roses descend on Towton, where a bloody, decisive battle literally crowns the Yorkist rebellion against Lancastrian King Henry VI. Anthony Woodville, Lord Scales, numbers among the Lancastrian dead, or so it seems.

Yet he revives, having dreamed during his resurrection the most impossible events, including a ceremony involving the Holy Grail. Almost as miraculously, the new monarch presumptive, Edward, accepts his oath of loyalty.

Anthony is neither the first nor the last great noble to change allegiances during the Wars of the Roses, but suspicion naturally clings to him. His rise — in all senses of the word — attracts enemies whose smiles must not be taken on trust. That’s true even, if not especially, after his sister, Elizabeth, marries Edward and becomes queen. The king’s brother-in-law stands to gain great wealth, power, and fame, which provokes jealousy among rivals and also means he is constantly at the crown’s beck and call.

Wonders Will Never Cease conveys the terror and chaos of England plagued by civil strife, yet this is no standard, ordinary historical tale, even though events follow the facts, and every character actually existed. If you’re looking for, say, The Kingmaker (Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick), he’s here, and so are Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and a host of others familiar from song and story.

Rather, it’s how Irwin presents these people and their actions that seems original. As an astute reviewer for the Guardian noted, the narrative reads like a Terry Pratchett fantasy, and a marvelously rich one it is. At times very funny but also deadly serious, the novel explores the uses and misuses of storytelling; whether heroes deserve admiration; and how inflated reputations entrap living legends.

In other words, Irwin’s writing about spin, and what’s left when you delve through it to the truth underneath. Do you find a hero, or a man on the make who’s too quick to avenge a slight or enrich himself? In the process, some famous figures take a drubbing. Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d’Arthur, attaches himself to Anthony, who, after listening to the legends, frankly wonders whether these Knights of the Round Table were such paragons after all.

But the most elaborate fun arrives through George Ripley, the king’s alchemist, who delights in making myths of real men. When Anthony first meets Ripley, he’s skeptical of having any use for a dabbler in metals, a prejudice that Ripley vigorously contests.

What results, however, has far-reaching consequences. Ripley embellishes Anthony’s history to include battles with imaginary demons and ascribes acts of chastity and piety that even the son of a fifteenth-century English earl would hesitate to claim.

Ripley knows that not everyone will believe everything, but that everybody will believe something, which makes him a sort of Abraham Lincoln before his time. And lest you think, as I did, that Ripley is too coincidental a name for a fabricator par excellence, let me repeat: He’s a historical figure.

But he probably didn’t spin tales like these, and I doubt very much whether he actually devised a Talking Head to tell the future. I love that touch, which sounds like a satire on today’s pundits, the only difference being that Edward IV’s version is always right. You can spin what you like, but you can’t outrun your fate.

To enjoy Wonders Will Never Cease, you have to like long interruptions to the forward narrative in which the characters tell stories and comment on them. But these tales have a purpose beyond the telling. They lead Anthony, who starts out as less than the deepest thinker, to consider the purpose of his life and what his fame actually means. And if we, the readers, ponder these issues too, I think Irwin has accomplished his purpose. ( )

Bizarre ( )

Robert Irwin's most recent novel Wonders Will Never Cease is in many ways a return to the form of his first The Arabian Nightmare. The setting is different: this one takes place in fifteenth-century England, and all of the principal characters are drawn from the history of the period. The elaborate narrative structure supports further stories within it, including Arthurian romance, Celtic myth, the Niebelung saga, prophecies, propaganda, dreams, and visions. As in The Arabian Nightmare, the boundaries between the imaginary and the "real" become very porous, and the reader is ultimately left with no defense against the fact that the contents of the book are all a story, but such a manifold and self-devouring story as to make one question the "reality" of the reader as well.

The narrative follows the adventures of Anthony Woodville, Lord Scales, who is slain in a battle at the beginning of the novel, but returned to life in a manner never fully explained. A nearly comparable amount of attention is devoted to the adventures of Woodville's fictional alter-egos, in the rumors about him manufactured by George Ripley (alchemist and spymaster to Edward IV), and in the legends and fairy-tales told by his mother, who is evidently no mean sorceress. Anthony himself learns a bit of magic from the scholar John Tiptoft. But this book is very far from the sort of modern fantasy re-visioning of the War of the Roses found in G.R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones books.

The idea of decapitation looms large in this book, although it has faded somewhat in public discourse over the last decade or so. I certainly took note early on when Irwin explained that it was customary for a medieval executioner to present the severed head first toward its former body, so that any trace awareness in the head could register its doom. As a reader of this intensely metafictional book, already-dead with Anthony Woodville, I felt more like a body regarding in fascination and horror the workings of my isolated head.