The novel is framed by the period between Jeanne’s decision to sign the ‘letter of abjuration’ and her execution, while she is ‘[d]eprived of her protective man’s outfit’ and forced into ‘a white, feminine gown’. The narrative point of view is pointedly – yet elegantly – fluid, embodying a range of perspectives in relation to its subject matter, shifting from Jeanne’s anguished inner plight to discursive evaluations of literary and historical representations of the Hundred Years’ War, shifting across tenses and genres, all the while retaining a consistent tone and register.

Alizadeh is particularly good at balancing the historical setting against fictional speculation. The brutality of the Hundred Years’ War – as well as Jeanne’s complicity in some of its atrocities – is firmly foregrounded, and serves to highlight the implications of various forms of identity across differing contexts. From an English perspective, the fact that Jeanne is French and a woman is reason enough to loathe her – one siege captain calls her a ‘filthy frog cunt whore’, and she is repeatedly threatened with sexual violence – but for her French comrades, Jeanne’s class and sexuality take on a similar significance.

Jeanne’s rejection of conventional womanhood in favour of a military career, manly clothes, and solitude is particularly perplexing to her captor’s wife, Lady Isabel le Despenser, who asks: ‘Did you never yearn for the company and affection of a lover? Have you never desired the blissful pleasures of motherhood? Have you ever wondered how it would have been to love and be loved by another?’ The first and last of these questions quickly become the focus of the novel.

Jeanne d’Arc écoutant les voix, by Eugène Thirion, 1876 (Wikimedia Commons)From its earliest pages, Jeanne’s ‘great’ and ‘unspeakable love’ brings to mind Lord Alfred Douglas’s ‘love that dare not speak its name’. We know where the story is headed, but Alizadeh’s account of Jeanne’s developing sexual and romantic desires, and of the relationship between the ‘voices’ she hears, her personal frustrations, and the ruptures in her sense of self, is brilliantly conceived. It is easy to imagine an impoverished version of The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc which would lean too heavily on the provocative nature of its central conceit and the ‘outrage against faith and historiography’ that it may represent to some readers, but Alizadeh has opted for verisimilitude and rich characterisation instead, and the kind of world-changing possibilities that can be attributed to love and desire.

Alizadeh employs unusual, but thrilling, formal devices throughout. Voices emerge, persist or fade. Jeanne’s second-person voice, which is addressed to her lover, is limited to parentheses before shedding its skin in the later sections. Her first-person voice appears suddenly, at a moment of keen anguish, and is injected into third-person paragraphs thereafter. The shift into a second major voice and perspective in the brief final section of the novel – which ‘talks back’ to the events and voices that come before it – is inspired. To Alizadeh’s great credit, he pursues these branching narrative strategies while maintaining an extraordinary fluency and coherence. The novel form is well equipped to embrace this kind of sprawl, but Alizadeh writes with such an astute sense of proportion that it barely seems like sprawl at all.

Above all else, The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc is that rare kind of love story: familiar but unpredictable; messy, yet achingly, gorgeously true. The myth is only partly unsettled, but the gaps in Jeanne’s story are coloured in with vibrant, piercing details. An illiterate peasant girl who ‘changed the course of Western history’ becomes one its greatest, tragic lovers. Read it and weep.