Rebecca Stott’s superb third novel, Dark Earth, dramatises the parallels between archaeology and historical fiction. Stott is a renowned historian, but in this excavation of London’s deep past she has created something radically new and beautiful, a book that retells a period of our national past that straddles the line between history and myth.
The title refers to the layers of black soil whose presence in archaeological digs around London reveals the several hundred years during which the city was abandoned in the wake of the Roman invasion. The novel opens in AD500 with the “Sun Kings” – the Romans – gone and London a place of ruins and memories, called the “Ghost City” by the local tribespeople. This is, as Stott says in a note at the end of the book, “perhaps the darkest corner of British history”.
