Celtic, European and Worldly

Heidi Katushka, Times Literary Supplement, Oxford, Saturday, 7th March 2026

In Celtic Domination: The Most Significant Influencers, Martyn de Tours (a pseudonym of the prolific, contrarian strategist Martyn Jones) has produced a work that is at once a novel, a manifesto, a pilgrimage memoir, and a speculative blueprint for pan-Celtic resurgence. Published in 2025 and running to some 428 pages in its paperback edition, the book arrives like a fever dream dispatched from the Camino de Santiago, where the author has evidently spent considerable time walking, talking, and ruminating. The result is a text that defies easy categorization, part sibling reunion laced with intrigue, part philosophical treatise on identity and power, part utopian pamphlet for a “Celtic Union”, and yet it coheres, after a fashion, through sheer audacity and the insistent pulse of its Celtic romanticism.

The narrative opens in a mist-shrouded London with Becci Lloyd, a “passive Marxist” academic and socialite of Welsh-Spanish extraction, confronting an enigmatic envelope from her brother Ricky. Their reunion unfolds in lush, sensory prose: tango danced to Astor Piazzolla in a house that hums with its own sentience, a black cab that feels conjured from fog, conversations that drift from tsundoku (the Japanese art of acquiring more books than one can read) to the spiritual geography of Córdoba and the Welsh valleys. De Tours writes with a lush, almost baroque attentiveness to atmosphere, the smell of Pedro Ximénez sherry, the scratch of an ancient gramophone, the way light catches Becci’s hair during a dance. These early scenes evoke a kind of enchanted domesticity, where memory and magic blur, and the siblings’ bond carries the weight of half-remembered childhood castles (Castell Coch looms large, its painted dome a recurring motif).

Yet the book quickly outgrows its realist frame. Ricky draws Becci into a web of intellectual conspirators, archaeologists, ethicists, and visionaries who convene under the sign of a revived Celtic covenant. What begins as personal reconnection escalates into a sprawling symposium on the “significant challenges” of the age: food and water security, tech disruption, inequality, governance, cybersecurity, environmental collapse. The middle sections read like a series of white papers or calls to action, interspersed with narrative vignettes, Oxford evenings, death threats, a “Blue Book Affair,” explosive deliveries of radical ideas. Becci emerges as a reluctant coordinator, shipping documents to Oxford and collaborating with a figure named Chelsea on a “Digital Celtic Covenant.”

The final third veers into overt speculation. Here de Tours sketches an ambitious vision for a Celtic Union spanning Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany, Galicia, and the Isle of Man: unified defense (humanitarian rather than militaristic), shared cybersecurity, a pan-Celtic university network, innovation hubs in green tech, AI, and biotech, collaborative cultural research, and a digital platform celebrating linguistic diversity. These proposals are earnest, even moving in their evocation of solidarity and sustainability, yet they sit uneasily beside the novel’s fictional scaffolding. The dialectic of domination, “the desire to dominate so that nobody can dominate”, receives a late, reflective coda, drawing on Thucydides, Hobbes, and the author’s own Camino conversations with a free-spirited Andalusian named Andrés. It is a poignant admission that the impulse to unity may carry its own shadow of control.

Stylistically, the prose is uneven but never dull. De Tours can be lyrical and precise (“the house tilts. Just slightly. Like a held breath”), then slip into earnest exposition or lists of policy prescriptions. The dialogue often feels stage-managed to advance ideas rather than reveal character, and the characters themselves, Becci’s poised rebellion, Ricky’s urgent charisma, remain somewhat archetypal vessels for the book’s larger enthusiasms. Yet there is charm in the book’s refusal to choose between fiction and polemic. It recalls the hybrid energies of early W.G. Sebald (the digressive travelogue fused with history) or Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (personal quest entwined with geopolitical dreaming), though without their ironic distance or formal rigor.

What saves Celtic Domination from mere wish-fulfillment is its underlying melancholy. The Celtic revival is presented not as inevitable triumph but as a fragile, almost quixotic response to a world of “ghosts and glass screens.” Becci’s longing, for a lost language, a childhood Wales, an unfractured kinship, mirrors the author’s own pilgrim reflections. The dedication to Galicia’s coastline, the Caminos, the Guardia Civil, and “kindred Celtic spirits” across time reads like a genuine ex-voto. Even the closing meditation on domination, born of childhood certainties that “our home… is ideal,” carries the humility of a man who has walked long roads and listened more than he has preached.

This is not a polished literary novel in the conventional sense. It is too didactic, too digressive, too enamoured of its own visions. Yet in an era when fiction often shies away from large ideas, de Tours dares to imagine a cultural and political alternative rooted in shared heritage rather than ethnic grievance or market logic. The result is an odd, heartfelt artefact: a book that walks the Camino of its own making, picking up stones of policy, memory, and myth along the way, and piling them into something that, if not a cathedral, is at least a cairn worth pausing before.