The Countenance Divine is an ambitious and intelligent novel spanning several centuries. While difficult to get into at first, this is an imaginative and entertaining tale and bodes well for Hughes' future work

A strange one this - I couldn't quite understand where it was going, if anywhere at all. I didn't find that the individual stories really related to eachother to add up to the ending. Maybe I was missing something, perhaps the references to Milton and how they relate to the other narrators in each timeline. Disappointed really.

I struggled with The Countenance Divine. It's an imaginative and ambitious idea but I didn’t find it sufficiently well done to hold my attention.

The book takes place in four time periods: 1999, 1888, 1777 and 1666, whose numerical characteristics mean that they are apocalyptic moments whose connection gradually becomes apparent. The chief characters concerned are a computer programmer dealing with the "Millennium Bug," Jack The Ripper, William Blake and John Milton and each section has a feel an language appropriate to its age. The story and idea emerges pretty slowly and even when the connections and theme began to become apparent, I found it a bit of a slog. I find it hard to put my finger on exactly why, but the idea never really took hold with me and the different periods and characters never quite came to life. I found the plodding, featureless prose of the 1999 sections especially hard to take; this is plainly a deliberate stylistic choice, but it seemed to me to be almost amateurish in its effect which made it extra tough going.

I'm sorry not to be more enthusiastic about The Countenance Divine because I applaud its ambition, it is well researched and I have an interest in both Blake and Milton. I have rounded 2.5 up to three stars for these reasons, but I'm afraid it just didn’t do it for me. Others have fared rather better, but I can't really recommend it, I'm afraid.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)