Jonathan Martin

In this novel Jonathan Martin, Ansgar Allen resurrects the incendiary life of the 19th-century outsider who, in 1829, set fire to York Minster. Martin's life - at once prophetic, deranged, and tragically emblematic of his age - becomes the ground for Allen's boldest experiment in historical fiction to date. Blending archival fragments, self-published pamphlets, trial records, and fictionalised reconstructions, Jonathan Martin asks: was Martin a prophet or a lunatic, an arsonist or a visionary? Allen's prose, at turns Joycean, Woolfian, and Beckettian, inhabits Martin's fractured language and his millenarian visions, bringing to life a world teetering between religious ecstasy, madness, and political upheaval. Structured in fragments that echo Martin's broken language and visions, the novel interlaces biography, dream, trial record, and philosophical meditation. Martin's story collides with those of his siblings - William the "Philosophical Conqueror of All Nations," John the Artist, Richard the Poet-Quartermaster - each of whom embodies another skewed path of enlightenment or ruin. At the centre stands Jonathan: incendiary, prophet, lunatic. A powerful meditation on authorial voice, writing as prophecy, and the boundaries between sanity and inspiration, Jonathan Martin continues Allen's exploration of education, deviance, and social order. It is a work of fiction that refuses to perpetuate the illusion of coherence, confronting the reader instead with the broken totality of a life lived on the edge of destruction.

"Ansgar Allen's new novel tableaus a life in fragments, exhibiting-by way of public dissection-a relentlessly detached and digressive sequence of blunt, dry, unflinching incisions into the heart of bleakness. Undeniably blackly comic, Jonathan Martin metafictionally nods to Tristram Shandy and B.S. Johnson, mocking the absurdity of the one-POV historic novel and our own needs for the impossible, mythological "truth.""-Vik Shirley

"This book is an act of negation, it tells us what literature is by telling us what it is not, what it can't do and what it won't. It is appositely negative-theological, it is also an act of arson of a sort."-Steve Hanson

"Jonathan Martin does not offer a linear tale of madness but a polyphonic reconstruction, where voices collide and history itself burns. Allen's prose inhabits Martin's broken language and visionary fury, producing a narrative that is as unsettling as it is hypnotic. At once historical fiction, philosophical meditation, and radical experiment, Jonathan Martin is a novel of fire and prophecy, of derangement and divine vengeance, that confronts the reader with the instability of reason and the dangerous allure of belief."-David Vichnar