Celestine: The Living Saint – Andy Clark

Initially available as a rather beautiful Limited Edition hardback before the standard editions arrived six months later, Andy Clark’s short novel Celestine: The Living Saint offers the most thorough exploration yet of the realities of life (and death) for the legendary Saint Celestine. It’s a dark, occasionally unsettling story of sacrifice, faith and duty with two strands split between a desperate battle in Imperium Nihilus and a journey of discovery set…somewhere else. Equal parts conventional 40k action story and allegorical journey, it explores both the trials that Celestine faces in return for her power, and the different ways she affects the Imperial citizens she fights alongside.

The two-strand narrative works nicely, allowing us to see things through the eyes of various Imperial characters as well as from Celestine’s own perspective. The sections set on Kophyn, in Imperium Nihilus, are actually the lighter of the two strands, despite portraying the Imperial forces suffering horrendous losses in a losing battle against the armies of Chaos, as characters like the Cadian Major Blaskaine and Sister Superior Meritorious offer more relatable viewpoints than Celestine herself. Each character views the intervention of the Saint in a different way, with questions of faith always at the heart of things – the worn-down Blaskaine in particular offers an interestingly sceptical perspective (and some entertaining dialogue) as he struggles to fit the idea of a living saint into his practical worldview.

Meanwhile seeing through Celestine’s eyes offers us insights into all sorts of questions – what happens to Celestine each time she dies, how she feels about the sacrifices she’s called to make, what drives her to keep fighting despite the horrors she faces, and so on. This is a character whose entire purpose is to fight and die over and over again in the name of the Emperor and the Imperium, and whose reward for all of her pain and suffering is nothing but more of the same. Clark’s writing has previously tended to focus a little more on the adventure side of 40k but this darker, grittier tone has been judged really well – there’s still plenty of action and entertainment to balance things out, but the bleak subject matter lends the whole story a sense of weight.

Despite its length (175 pages in hardback) this manages to cover quite a lot of ground, and feels like the right length for the story that Clark has chosen to tell. You might argue that the one visible compromise is with the antagonists, as there just isn’t scope here to really develop the forces of Chaos – they’re portrayed largely in the abstract, and inevitably there would have been further opportunities to build in more identity for them in a longer story. That’s actually not an issue at all for the Celestine-focused strand of the story, which is intentionally more abstract, and there’s still plenty of conflict within the Imperial ranks in the other strand, as Celestine’s power and authority is interpreted differently across the breadth of the Imperial forces.

It’s worth pointing out that while this is set during the ‘current’ timeline, i.e after the fall of Cadia, it’s very much a standalone story and doesn’t directly continue on from either the main 40k narrative or Clark’s own Shroud of Night (which featured Celestine). If you’re specifically looking for something which fits in with an ongoing narrative then you probably won’t find that here. Instead, what you’ll find is an interesting character study wrapped up in an entertaining story, and a book which does an excellent job of reminding us that in 40k, even the brightest and most glorious characters are built atop dark and unsettling foundations.

Click here to buy Celestine: The Living Saint (or click here for the audiobook on Audible).