For around twenty years, I have listed Bernard Cornwell as
one of my favourite authors. The other month I finished reading Death of Kings, the latest instalment in
his ‘Saxon’ series which is worth a read if you like novels that you can come
away from with the feeling that you’ve actually learned something interesting
as a result of having read them.
Bernard Cornwell’s novels usually centre around an honest
man of action who has little time for political scheming, and in this series
the hero/narrator is Uhtred, a Saxon who was brought up as a Viking but who
fights (somewhat reluctantly) for Alfred the Great, King of Wessex and the one
man standing between the Vikings and their goal of dominating all of Britain. This
has formed the basis of the series so far, but in this sixth novel the focus
changes as Alfred is dying, various would-be successors are getting ready to
make their bids for power and the fragile truce between Wessex and the Vikings
is about to fall apart.
Alfred the Great has somewhat fallen out of favour with
whoever decides what should be part of the history curriculum in schools (in
which there’s a big gap between the Romans and 1066), even though his story is
integral to the formation of what would come to be England. But Cornwell’s Alfred is
no warrior king. His take on Alfred as a sickly scholar who is very much the
‘brains behind the operation’ is an good one, and having the narrator as a
pagan – in contrast to the pious Alfred – allows the author to explore more
fully the struggle between Christianity and paganism that he started on in the
Warlord trilogy – a reinterpretation of the Arthurian legends which I still
think is Cornwell’s best work. I think there’s a touch of the pagan in
Cornwell, as the Christians of his stories are portrayed in a rather negative
light. Although it clearly inspires some of the characters to do great things,
organised religion is portrayed here as a force for intolerance, pomposity and
repression (over the course of Death of
Kings, Uhtred manages to infuriate and poke fun at several clergymen to
good comic effect). In a sense, therefore, there’s something very modern about
these books even though they’re set in the Dark Ages.
One of Cornwell’s more shorter works is the blurb that
features on the cover of every edition of every Simon Scarrow novel, in which
he is quoted as saying ‘I really don’t need this kind of competition’. Simon
Scarrow has been around for over a decade now, during the course of which he
has produced the ‘Eagle’ series of novels about Macro and Cato, a pair of Roman soldiers who,
although initially mismatched (bluff veteran and younger, more thoughtful man
who is mentored in the ways of soldiering by said veteran) become firm and
trusted friends. Their adventures have taken them to various parts of the Roman
Empire of the mid-first century AD and supporting characters have included
Vespasian, Boadicea, St Peter (I kid you not) and Narcissus, the imperial
secretary to the Emperor Claudius who serves as a scheming proto-spymaster who
gets our heroes to do his dirty work despite the fact that they’d much rather
be doing some good, honest soldiering (shades of Bernard Cornwell here).
No novel set in the past can truly escape the time at which
it is written, and this applies to novels about the Romans as much as it does
to those about the Saxons. In the former, an all-conquering empire has invaded
places like Britannia and Judea but is
struggling to govern these unruly provinces, with the locals engaging in
guerrilla-type resistance that the highly-disciplined Roman army is unable to
deal with as effectively as it can deal with its enemies in a proper battle. As
such, some people are coming to the conclusion that it would be better to
withdraw from such places. The plot of one of the earlier books, When the Eagle Hunts, centres around the
kidnapping of a general’s family by a group of religious fanatics (Druids in
this case, but the modern parallel is obvious).
The eleventh and latest in this series, Praetorian, takes us to the heart of Rome itself as our heroes go
undercover as ordinary soldiers to join the Praetorian Guard in order to root
out a conspiracy against the Emperor. As a result, this is a little different
from the other books as Macro and Cato become immersed in espionage and
politics. There’s less fighting than usual and more sneaking around and talking
in whispers, and when there is fighting it’s in the form of street brawls
rather than pitched battles. There are a few points where one gets the
impression of this being a thriller that just happens to be set in Ancient Rome
– the novel begins with a well-planned heist, and at one stage a couple of
characters need to be taken out of the city quickly and someone says he’s got a
horse-and-cart in a lock-up down the road that can be used. There are also a
few light-hearted moments, such as when Narcissus wonders why there isn’t a
(Latin) word for that feeling of superiority you get when you hear of someone
else’s misfortune.
The Emperor at the heart of the action is Claudius. Rather
like Alfred the Great, we have become accustomed to a certain idea of what he
was like as a person. Thanks largely to Robert Graves (author of I Claudius) and Derek Jacobi (who played Claudius in the TV adaptation of Graves’s novel), we think of him as a man
who, thanks to a stutter and a pronounced limp, is written off by everyone as a
fool, but beneath the bumbling exterior he is in fact very intelligent and he
eventually becomes a surprisingly effective emperor. There’s some of that in
Scarrow’s interpretation, although his Claudius is more reflective of the
Claudius of Suetonius’s The Twelve
Caesars – over-reliant on advisers, manipulated by those around him and
something of a dirty old man. Waiting to take over is his adopted son, Nero,
shown here as a thoughtful youngster rather than the murderous tyrant he would become.
Macro and Cato will return, we are assured, and when they do
they’ll be back with the legions in Britannia so it looks as though Scarrow
wants to return to the successful formula of his earlier books. In the
meantime, his latest novel, due out in paperback later this year, is about an
English knight at the siege of Malta.
I can’t wait.
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