Fiction Reviews
The Song of Seven Cloaks
(2026) Harry Bonelle, Unicorn, £20, hrdbk, 214pp, ISBN 978-1-918271-03-4
Most retellings of ancient myth concern themselves with the famous moments. Harry Bonelle's The Song of Seven Cloaks instead takes one of the oldest stories ever recorded and asks what happened after the adventure ended. The result is a strange, beautiful and often haunting miniature epic that demonstrates just how much imaginative space can still be found within the world's oldest surviving literature, drawing its inspiration from the Cedar Forest episode of the Epic of Gilgamesh. In the ancient Mesopotamian tale, Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu journey to the sacred forest, defeat its monstrous guardian Humbaba, and claim the cedars for themselves. It is a moment of triumph, but also the beginning of tragedy, for their actions disturb the balance between humanity, nature and the divine order.
The Red Beast is dead. Its severed head has been taken as a trophy. Yet, seven mysterious entities known as the Cloaks survive the fall of Humbaba and flee into the depths of the ancient woods. Unless they are hunted down, the conquest of the Cedar Forest cannot be completed. Gilgamesh, driven by ambition, insists on continuing the hunt, while Enkidu follows his friend deeper into a landscape that increasingly resembles a dream, a nightmare and a spiritual trial all at once.
With the Song of Seven Cloaks, Bonelle has created an epyllion (a miniature, epic poem), a miniature epic, told primarily through verse written in trimeters and tetrameters, with occasional prose passages at key moments.
The story unfolds over seven sections as Gilgamesh and Enkidu pursue the Cloaks through the forest, each encounter becomes less a battle and more a test. The Cloaks are not monsters to be slain but manifestations of something deeper, forcing the companions to confront questions about identity, power, memory, mortality and desire.
The narrative belongs largely to Enkidu, who provides the emotional heart of the story. Bonelle emphasises his liminal nature, his origins among beasts and wilderness rather than civilisation. Again and again, he is confronted with questions about who he really is, whether he belongs in Gilgamesh's world at all, and what has been lost through the process of becoming human.
One by one, the Cloaks are retrieved and sent down to the Deep to the realm of the Underqueen either by being buried or floated downstream to sink in the sea. It is enough for Enkidu to have killed the Red Beast and take its head back to the city as proof, but Gilgamesh wants more. He wants to cut down the trees and use them to make new gates for the city, but the trees reject the cut made by Enkidu’s axe and repair the damage he has done. In a wonderful section that is a mixture of folklore and fairy tale, the two friends come to a house in the forest where a monkey and his monkey wife live. They are the perfect hosts and everything seems idyllic, almost like a dream, but is it a thinly veiled nightmare. Enkidu sees the reality of what lies beneath their surroundings and the third and fourth cloaks are claimed.
Enkidu is taunted while trying to find the fifth cloak – about his origins, about his relationship with Gilgamesh, about his own worth. He encounters the trapper he has always evaded and also another, perhaps, truer, beastlier self. All of these things he must conquer to claim the fifth cloak.
Searching for the sixth cloak, Enkidu discovers a huge sinkhole created by the body of Humbaba. He comes across a huge pool which is being fed by a river. On one side of the pool the forest is green, on the other side the trees are dying. Gilgamesh shows Enkidu the beginnings of a city he plans to build called the Cedar City and replace the City of the Plains, moving all of its inhabitants to the forest. Enkidu notices Gilgamesh’s strangeness and together they plunge down into the Wise One’s Well where Enkidu draws the poison from the king and the sixth cloak emerges from his mouth to be claimed by the Underqueen. The seventh cloak is an Opal given up by the moon as Enkidu is buried before the waking cedars who have risen from the depths.
What ultimately elevates The Song of Seven Cloaks above a clever literary exercise is its thematic richness. Beneath the fantasy adventure lies a meditation on conquest and stewardship. Gilgamesh sees the Cedar Forest as a resource to be claimed and transformed. Enkidu increasingly understands that the forest possesses a life and purpose of its own. The struggle between the two perspectives gives the poem much of its power.
In this sense Bonelle remains true to the spirit of Gilgamesh. The ancient epic is not merely a tale of heroic exploits but a story about limits, mortality and the consequences of human ambition. The Song of Seven Cloaks explores many of those same concerns while finding room for modern resonances concerning humanity's relationship with the natural world.
The verse itself is accessible while remaining consistently lyrical in a style that feels rooted in myth without becoming inaccessible. The shifting rhythms suit the dreamlike atmosphere, carrying the reader through scenes rich in symbolism and colour.
If the book has a weakness, it is that some of its symbolism can become elusive. Readers searching for a straightforward fantasy adventure may occasionally find themselves adrift amid the imagery, while certain episodes seem designed to be experienced rather than fully understood on a first reading. Yet this ambiguity is also part of the poem's appeal. Like the myths that inspired it, The Song of Seven Cloaks rewards reflection and rereading.
In an era when mythological retellings crowd bookshop shelves, Harry Bonelle has managed something increasingly rare. Rather than simply retelling an old story, he has expanded it and transformed it into something distinctively his own. The result is a thoughtful and imaginative work that feels at once ancient and new, a journey through the shadowy spaces between the lines of humanity's oldest epic.
Highly recommended.
Ian Hunter
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