ILKA Tampke’s debut novel, Skin, explores what it is to be an outsider in your own community — not a bad theme for the world today.
Not that 14-year-old servant girl Ailia’s lack of "skin" — she was abandoned at birth and so does not have, handed down from her parents, a totem — is a metaphor for anything. This is a story about life in Iron Age Britain — Skin opens in AD28 and finishes 17 years later — and nothing else. As that it is an excellent read.
Ailia’s lack of skin cuts her of from the privileges of learning — she is not even taught to swim — marriage and other tribal ceremonies. She lives on the outskirts of the society she serves, and within her there is both acceptance and resentment. Tampke has created a very real, flawed character, making Ailia believable and compelling.
Unlike the tribe’s other "skinless" people who live beyond the formal edge of the village of Caer Cad, Ailia lives with Cookmother, a medicine woman, within the village. She also works as servant to the tribe’s queen, Fraid. Observant and clever, Ailia learns despite not being allowed knowledge.
In AD43 the Romans are poised on the French coast, ready to invade Britain. Young warrior Ruther — with whom Ailia takes her first tumble, at Beltane (the Gaelic May Day festival) — is awed by a recent trip to Rome, and eager to persuade his tribe to embrace Roman ways. He sees the city as vastly superior — aqueducts, marble pillars, plumbing — and the Roman army as formidable in its discipline in contrast to the Britons’ individual independence, even on the battlefield. Worried that the Romans will obliterate his people, Ruther also sees capitulation as the only way to survival.
But the Caer Cad lifestyle is steeped in pagan ritual, and the village is not keen on handing over its independence to the Romans, who they expect will execute their druids. Neither is Ailia, despite her physical attraction to Ruther, and his openness to her (because he cares less for the tribal traditions, seeing them as standing in the way of modernity).
Just as Ruther represents the new, another young man in Ailia’s life, Taliesin, symbolises the strength of the pagan lifestyle that has sustained the tribe. She first meets him at the edge of a river, fish hook lodged in his lip, and uses the medical knowledge she has gleaned to help him.
Ailia is forced to choose between these young men, just as the tribe must choose to save its peace by submitting to Roman rule, or fight against the Roman invasion and possibly lose everything. More importantly, Ailia must choose between accepting her outsider’s life, or embracing another one offered her: that of breaching the rules of the tribal religion and stepping beyond the strictures of "skin" to gain knowledge and help her tribe fight for its freedom.
Full of the triumph of Ailia’s human spirit, intrigue, magic and tragedy, this is an engaging read that will probably also be loved by teens.
Picture: THINKSTOCK
ILKA Tampke’s debut novel, Skin, explores what it is to be an outsider in your own community — not a bad theme for the world today.
Not that 14-year-old servant girl Ailia’s lack of "skin" — she was abandoned at birth and so does not have, handed down from her parents, a totem — is a metaphor for anything. This is a story about life in Iron Age Britain — Skin opens in AD28 and finishes 17 years later — and nothing else. As that it is an excellent read.
Ailia’s lack of skin cuts her of from the privileges of learning — she is not even taught to swim — marriage and other tribal ceremonies. She lives on the outskirts of the society she serves, and within her there is both acceptance and resentment. Tampke has created a very real, flawed character, making Ailia believable and compelling.
Unlike the tribe’s other "skinless" people who live beyond the formal edge of the village of Caer Cad, Ailia lives with Cookmother, a medicine woman, within the village. She also works as servant to the tribe’s queen, Fraid. Observant and clever, Ailia learns despite not being allowed knowledge.
In AD43 the Romans are poised on the French coast, ready to invade Britain. Young warrior Ruther — with whom Ailia takes her first tumble, at Beltane (the Gaelic May Day festival) — is awed by a recent trip to Rome, and eager to persuade his tribe to embrace Roman ways. He sees the city as vastly superior — aqueducts, marble pillars, plumbing — and the Roman army as formidable in its discipline in contrast to the Britons’ individual independence, even on the battlefield. Worried that the Romans will obliterate his people, Ruther also sees capitulation as the only way to survival.
But the Caer Cad lifestyle is steeped in pagan ritual, and the village is not keen on handing over its independence to the Romans, who they expect will execute their druids. Neither is Ailia, despite her physical attraction to Ruther, and his openness to her (because he cares less for the tribal traditions, seeing them as standing in the way of modernity).
Just as Ruther represents the new, another young man in Ailia’s life, Taliesin, symbolises the strength of the pagan lifestyle that has sustained the tribe. She first meets him at the edge of a river, fish hook lodged in his lip, and uses the medical knowledge she has gleaned to help him.
Ailia is forced to choose between these young men, just as the tribe must choose to save its peace by submitting to Roman rule, or fight against the Roman invasion and possibly lose everything. More importantly, Ailia must choose between accepting her outsider’s life, or embracing another one offered her: that of breaching the rules of the tribal religion and stepping beyond the strictures of "skin" to gain knowledge and help her tribe fight for its freedom.
Full of the triumph of Ailia’s human spirit, intrigue, magic and tragedy, this is an engaging read that will probably also be loved by teens.
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