Celtic, European and Worldly

Pamela Paddington, Times Literary Supplement, Oxford, Saturday, 7th March 2026

There are novels that announce themselves with a trumpet blast, and others that arrive like weather. Celtic Domination by Martyn de Tours belongs firmly to the latter category: a book that drifts in on a sea-fog of memory, mysticism, political anxiety, and intellectual ambition, and then, rather unexpectedly, begins rearranging the furniture of the reader’s mind.

From the opening pages, where Becci Lloyd stalks across a London floorboard as though rehearsing a goodbye, the novel establishes its peculiar register: half political salon, half metaphysical séance. Becci, a self-styled “passive Marxist,” inhabits a world of velvet robes, glowing envelopes, and libraries so dense with books they seem to whisper among themselves. She is the sort of character who could plausibly quote Marx in a Mercedes while also arguing with the television about the collapse of public broadcasting. Her brother Ricky, part confidant, part conspirator, enters the stage bearing flowers and secrets. Between them stretches the novel’s central tension: a mixture of familial intimacy and ideological excavation.

At first glance, the book resembles a piece of literary magical realism set in the high-end salons of London. But this is misleading. De Tours is doing something stranger. Celtic Domination is less a conventional narrative than an intellectual cabaret: philosophy, history, satire, mysticism, and political ranting share the same stage. Characters wander through restaurants that feel like portals between centuries, books breathe like animals, and ravens deliver cryptic visions about a “Celtic covenant.”

One could call it eccentric. One could also call it prophetic.

---

The Celtic Dream Against the Modern Nightmare

The novel’s surface concerns the rediscovery of a mysterious manuscript left by Becci and Ricky’s father—an intellectual relic tied to something called the Celtic Council. But beneath this quasi-detective premise runs a deeper current: a civilizational lament.

Again and again, the book returns to the same anxiety: that something essential in the West, curiosity, cultural memory, intellectual seriousness, has been eroded by the shrill, transactional culture of the present. De Tours’s characters wander through London like archaeologists of their own civilisation, brushing dust off old ideals: community, language, learning, hospitality.

In a world of algorithmic rage and political theatre, they look almost absurdly civilized.

That is, of course, precisely the point.

The book’s Celtic framework, Wales, Galicia, Ireland, Brittany, is not deployed as a blood-and-soil fantasy but as a metaphor for cultural memory. Celtic identity here is not nationalism; it is a reminder that human societies once valued things beyond quarterly profits and social-media clout: kinship, land, stories, language, the open table of debate.

It is a quietly radical idea.

---

A Novel That Loves the Mind

De Tours writes as if conversation itself were an endangered species. Long passages unfold as philosophical duets: Becci and Ricky debating childhood, politics, media, and metaphysics over food and wine in a clandestine restaurant whose very existence feels like a rebuke to the noisy vulgarity of contemporary life.

The style is luxuriant, sometimes extravagantly so. Sentences billow and curl like incense smoke. Images arrive in waves: gramophones awakening, flowers changing colour, televisions whispering conspiratorially in empty rooms.

Occasionally the prose tips into baroque excess. But it is an excess of enthusiasm rather than ego. De Tours writes like someone intoxicated by the sheer possibility of language.

And at its best the book captures something rare: the feeling of intelligent people thinking aloud.

---

The Real Enemy: The Age of Stupidity

If the novel sometimes resembles a mystical political thriller, its real antagonist is something more mundane and more frightening: intellectual decline.

Becci’s furious monologues about television news, those passages where she rages against propaganda, media stupidity, and cultural amnesia, may strike some readers as excessive. They are not wrong. They are merely early.

Her critique is not limited to one ideology or another; it is directed at the entire machinery of contemporary discourse: punditry, social-media hysteria, political branding, the transformation of truth into spectacle.

And here the book begins to brush against the political reality of our time.

The rise of MAGA-style politics in the United States—and its European cousins—has often been described as populism. But that word is too polite. What we are witnessing, on both sides of the Atlantic, is the weaponization of ignorance: a politics built on grievance, conspiracy, and theatrical hostility toward expertise.

In such an environment, a novel like Celtic Domination almost feels subversive.

It assumes readers enjoy ideas.

It assumes culture matters.

It assumes that the past contains wisdom rather than merely ammunition.

These assumptions alone make it a kind of literary insurgency.

---

Against the New Barbarism

The MAGA movement, and the wider ecosystem of extreme-right populism, thrives on a particular fantasy: that civilisation was ruined by intellectuals, cosmopolitans, and cultural pluralism. The solution, in this mythology, is a return to some mythical golden age where authority was simple and dissent was minimal.

De Tours offers the opposite vision.

His Celtic inheritance is not about closing borders or purifying identity. It is about remembering complexity: multiple languages, overlapping histories, porous cultures. Wales touches Galicia; Ireland touches Brittany; Europe itself becomes a tapestry rather than a fortress.

In that sense the novel is a quiet rebuke to the tribal shouting matches of modern politics. It insists that identity can be layered, intellectual life can be playful, and cultural memory can be generous rather than paranoid.

MAGA politics thrives on simplification: slogans instead of thought, rage instead of curiosity.

Celtic Domination refuses that simplicity.

It is messy, digressive, sometimes maddeningly intellectual, and gloriously so.

Reading it is like wandering into a long dinner party where someone has opened three bottles of wine and started discussing history, metaphysics, media corruption, Welsh poetry, and the fate of Western civilization all at once.

It is the sort of evening populist demagogues fear most.

Because nothing undermines authoritarian thinking quite like intelligent conversation.

---

A Flawed but Fascinating Work

This is not a perfect novel.

Its narrative occasionally meanders. Characters sometimes speak in essays rather than dialogue. The mystical elements, ravens, glowing books, and prophetic visions, hover awkwardly between allegory and literal magic.

But these imperfections are inseparable from the book’s ambition.

De Tours is attempting something large: a philosophical novel about culture, memory, politics, and belonging in a time of intellectual chaos. The result is less a tidy narrative than a literary ecosystem.

You don’t so much read it as wander through it.

---

The Final Question

Near the beginning of the book, a mysterious letter threatens to “change everything.” The phrase might easily be dismissed as thriller cliché.

But by the end of the opening movement, it begins to feel like a metaphor for something larger: the possibility that civilization itself might still change direction.

Against the noise of culture wars and populist theatrics, Celtic Domination proposes a quieter revolution.

Read books.

Argue intelligently.

Remember where you come from.

Refuse the politics of stupidity.

It is not a slogan that fits on a baseball cap.

Which may be precisely why it matters.