This one was a doozy, but a good doozy. The Winter King is the first book in a trilogy that Bernard Cornwell calls "The Warlord Chronicles." It's a retelling of the King Arthur legend, but with extra attention paid to incorporating the scraps of historical data we have from back then, as well as a dark, gritty, and earthy interpretation that refuses to whitewash the characters or the setting.
It was a really, really good book.
The setting is Britain, about 500 AD. The Romans have left and the power vacuum left behind attracted Irish and Saxon conquerors. The Britons are besieged on both sides, and they can't even stop fighting amongst themselves.
The title refers to the young king Mordred, born after his father died because Arthur didn't arrive soon enough to rescue him. The elder Mordred was beloved by Uther Pendragon, and Arthur was already an unacknowledged bastard, but the death of Mordred essentially broke Uther. Uther dies, and Mordred is totally incapable of running the country.
The book is about the instabilities caused by a child king. It's narrated in first person by a character named Derfel (pronounced Derv-el) Cadarn, a former warrior now serving as a monk in his old age and writing about the events long after the fact.
We spend most of our time with Derfel in the past, but with occasional interludes of old Derfel in the "present."
The opening few pages of this book are a masterclass in the raconteur style. The tone and mood are perfect to drag you in, and the atmosphere is truly high-level. The tone is slightly old-fashioned but not at all difficult to read. The rest of the book isn't quite as polished as those first few pages, but they're still really well-written.
Cornwell tends toward long descriptions. He might spend half a page describing a walkway around the side of a fort that we'll never see again. But he's a skilled describer, and there's enough action and intrigue and mystery packed in and around those descriptions that they never bored me.
The dialogue is believable and tightly wound, with good helpings of it. With all the political maneuvering and backstabbing, we get lots of tension and uncertainty, as well as some very engaging examples of difficult compromise. In addition, the incorporation of Druidic customs adds a sense of literal madness to the behavior of some characters, which makes things even more uncertain at times.
Compared to my perspective of other Arthur stories (admittedly, I'm not an Arthur expert; most of my knowledge probably comes from watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail), I suspect this one is much less sanitized than others. To put things euphemistically, we see a lot of references to bodily wastes and their applications, as well as frank descriptions of how prisoners of war were... treated.
There are lots of spells and charms but we never see any obvious effects or light shows. Think extremely low-magic fantasy. We see people "cast spells" but whether they actually do anything is not clear.
One minor quibble is that Cornwell has a technique that shows up a couple of times where he writes a long paragraph about one thing, and then adds a single short sentence either in tension with that paragraph or completely moving in a different direction. To me, it felt cheap, and it clashed with the storyteller style of the rest of the narrative. But that was really my biggest criticism of the text.
The characters are complex and realistic. Nobody's pure good, and nobody's pure evil, though some get close. Arthur and Merlin in particular are much less idealized than maybe you've seen them elsewhere. Arthur is foolishly merciful and early on breaks a major oath. Merlin is strange, single-minded, and extremely callous.
This is not the Disney Sword and the Stone.
If you want more spoilers, check the section of the embedded video starting at 23:23.
All in all, I thought it was an excellent book. Anyone interested in historical fiction in this era should definitely take a look, and anybody who likes low-magic fantasy will probably enjoy it, too. The only caveat is that you may find some of the stuff in it too gross if you have a weak stomach. However, most of that stuff shows up early, so you should be able to tell if it's too much for you with an Amazon preview or whatever.
Grab a copy here.
No comments:
Post a Comment