Book Review: ‘Bog Queen’ by Anna North

I read Anna North’s ‘Outlawed’ back in 2021 and fell unexpectedly in love with it. Even though it was historical fiction which I normally don’t love, but the vividness of the setting and the quiet feminism around womanhood and the right to choose captured me. ‘Bog Queen’ is North’s first novel since ‘Outlawed’ and I snapped it up immediately.

In 2018, a young forensic scientist, homesick and adrift in the North of England, is heading to a coroner's office to identify a body. But this body, found in a moss-layered bog, is not like any Agnes has seen before: its bones prove it was buried more than two thousand years ago, yet it is almost perfectly preserved.

Soon Agnes is drawn into a mystery from the distant past: the death of an Iron Age queen more like her than she knows. Along the way, she must contend with numerous groups who want to profit from the bog and activists who demand that the land be left undisturbed. Meanwhile, underfoot, there's the land itself: the wet, teeming colony of moss has its own dark stories to tell.

As Agnes becomes tangled in controversies stirred up by her own discovery, she must face the deep history of what she has unearthed. In Bog Queen, the lives of two young women separated by many centuries become inextricably connected, as each learns to harness their strange strengths in a landscape more mysterious than either can imagine.

Just like ‘Outlawed’, ‘Bog Queen’ has elements of historical fiction but taking us back to the Iron Age, but I fell effortlessly into this novel.

We actually have three POVs in ‘Bog Queen’: Agnes in 2018, the Druid of Bereda is the late Iron Age (but pre-Boudicca), and the choral voice of the moss of the Ludlow bog.

Agnes is an American finishing out an anthropology research project with a university who is struggling to find another position to keep her in the UK, resisting returning home to her father in the United States and the life she fled. Dabbling in police investigations as a forensic anthropologist leads her to the discovery of a body in the Ludlow bog, thought to be a woman who was killed in the 1950s. When Agnes arrives, she immediately dates the body at much, much older. Iron Age, old.

There’s a tension and an urgency to Agnes’s narration as she races against the dual threats of an environmental group blocking their excavation site to occupy the land and protect it from a a peat mining company starting work on a housing development now that they’ve cleared most of the valuable peat. While the peat company are the obvious enemies, the conflict between Agnes and Nicholas, the head of the environmental group, and the growing camaraderie as Agnes learns about and slowly begins to understand the bog is so captivating. It’s a really delicate balance between the need for growth, learning and understanding, and the need for protection and preservation, and of course, the uniting of both factions against greed and capitalism.

It took me a while to settle into the hazy, fleeting chapters that we spend with the Druid of Bereda as she journeys from her northern village to Camulodunum, the first Roman city in Britain, which is now known as Colchester, to meet the King. She battles with her new position as the Druid, the clashes with her brother and Segu, a former friend and potential new enemy, as well as grappling with how to deal with the imminent threat of Rome in the North of England. I wanted to know more about her, but was also anxious to see her story progress considering we know where it ends.

‘Bog Queen’ has a lot to say and says it among some masterful characterisation and incredibly beautiful writing. I can only hope it’s not another four years before I get to read Anna North again.

Thank you to NetGalley and Weidenfeld & Nicolson for the review copy.