Where Blaise Spies on the Rebels

The King's Cavalier by Samuel Shellabarger
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This 1950 historical fiction novel is one of the best things I've read in in the last year. Set in 1500s France, it tells a story of spies, international intrigue, romance, and sword fighting in the best tradition of The Three Musketeers and The Princess Bride. (No ROUS's, but pretty much everything else.) It was fun all the way through, tightly plotted and action-filled, but it was also very well written, with fantastic prose. Nothing missing here. All five stars, easy.

Blaise Lalliere is a soldier from a minor noble family. He's not considered all that clever, but when his family sides with their liege, the Duke of Bourbon, against the king, he doesn't go along with it. When he defends de Surcy, one of the king's counselors, from the conspirators, he is enlisted to help with covert actions by him and the king's mother, and it is on this mission that he and others discover that he does have a flair for intrigue, that there's more to him than the simple soldier. A good part of the book has him escorting an English woman to Geneva for the regent, keeping an eye on her. The king is interested in her, but she is also a suspected spy. The rest of the book is set up by that start, with new and trickier dilemmas for the main characters; he and Anne Russell are intelligent, noble, and honorable, and both are conflicted by various allegiances that make every action fraught with danger one way or another.

If an action novel this engaging and exciting had been written 200 years ago by Scott or Dumas, I would have read it long ago, along with a million others, and it would probably be a classic with its own Wikipedia page. If it had been written last year, I'd be hearing about it on TikTok. But until I happened on a book by this author in a used book store, I'd never heard of it or him. 1950 is an awkward place for genre fiction like this--both too new and too old to come to our attention except by accident.

Look this one up. I loved it.

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Where Warwick Makes the Kings

The last of the barons by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an amazing book. Definitely 5 stars.

Bulwer-Lytton tells the story here of Richard Nevile, the Kingmaker, known better as Earl Warwick, and his support for King Edward that turned to rebellion against him. There's a huge cast, including the king and his family, Warwick's family and many relatives, the deposed King Henry's family and allies in France, along with many named servants, middle-class merchants, peasants, soldiers, and so on. The most sympathetic characters for me were a poor young woman of noble blood, Sybil, and her scholarly father, along with a goldsmith relative of Warwick's who fell in love with the young woman. Another Nevile in the story is Sir Marmaduke, a rustic warrior who becomes a stalwart defender of Warwick, his relative, and though he's sometimes a figure of fun, he eventually makes himself a hero. (He reminds me of the Sir Duncan character in the Game of Thrones spinoff called A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms--honest but dumb. Same guy.) But the bigger story is how Warwick worked to uphold Edward IV's reign until the king dishonored his daughter, turning Warwick against him, leading to the back-and-forth of kings and supporters of York and Lancaster that marked the midpoint in the War of the Roses.

(The ending comes later, about 15 years after the novel, with Edward's brother Richard, known before as Gloucester, and the last of the York lineage falling to the Tudors.)

The prose here is dense, more elevated and complex even than Sir Walter Scott (who I also love), and many years ago I would have passed on this book, but if you can get into the rhythm of this kind of 19th century storytelling, it's great. Here's a typical passage, where a leading rebel from the peasant class lays out the complaints against the government of Edward of York:

With clear precision, in indignant, but not declamatory eloquence, he painted the disorders of the time: the insolent exactions of the hospitals and abbeys; the lawless violence of each petty baron; the weakness of the royal authority in restraining oppression; its terrible power in aiding the oppressor. He accumulated instance on instance of misrule; he showed the insecurity of property; the adulteration of the coin; the burden of the imposts; he spoke of wives and maidens violated; of industry defrauded; of houses forcibly entered; of barns and granaries despoiled; of the impunity of all offenders, if high-born; of the punishment of all complaints, if poor and lowly.

This passage also clarifies one of the major themes of the book, which is that the people suffered under unchecked barons, and they hoped that a more centralized government under a stronger monarchy would rein them in. (It was a pretty dream.) In places, the tone is lighter, even playful, and in others we see characters speaking in the courtly language of the time, with knights trying to win fair ladies or courtiers trying to influence the king. But there's also a lot of direct action, including battle but not exclusively so, forcibly rendered. The last 10% of the book is Edward's campaign to take back his kingdom, which ends with a long, vivid description of the Battle of Barnet in 1471, when the Kingmaker, Warwick, and his brother, Montagu, are both killed, ending the rebellion. (Sorry! Spoilers!)

Bulwer-Lytton famously started another novel with the words "It was a dark and stormy night." That language has made him an object of fun, but anyone who read this book--with its excellent research, scholarly footnotes, and brilliant plotting over the length of about 250,000 words--would maybe reconsider their opinion.

I loved it. Fantastic historical novel. Recommended.

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Where William Wouldn't Take No For an Answer

The Conqueror by Georgette Heyer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a good book, one well worth reading, even though it took me quite a while to work through it. Rating it for fun, I'd lean more 3, due to some pacing issues (IMO). But there's more to this novel than entertainment. For historical scholarship, its finely crafted setting, its welcome complexity, and a very educational narrative, I'd give it a 4 at least.

I know Heyer mostly from her Regency romances, the books I was sent to when I asked other lovers of Jane Austen what author they thought wrote most like Austen. Since then, I've read maybe 9 or 10 of them, and I've enjoyed them collectively more than I originally expected. I've also read a mystery or two of hers, and I'd say those were okay; I'm not a huge fan of country estate murder mysteries, though I'll read one here and there. What I didn't know until now was that Heyer wrote straight-up historical novels. That's what this is. There's no more than a touch of romance here, and there's no mystery at all. There are women, and lovers, and love stories found in these pages, but this is book is closer to a biography of William the Conqueror. Told mostly from the perspective of Raoul, one of his closest supporters, the book covers about 20 years of William's life, ending shortly after the invasion of 1066.

(Hope that's not a spoiler.)

The beginning wasn't what I expected. Grimmer, maybe. The focus seemed odd. (This was all my fault, btw.) Even 50 or 100 pages in, I started to think the book would turn out to be a romance (of the bodice-ripping, chest-heaving, raven-haired tresses sort that I don't have much interest in), with a melodramatic tone and low stakes. But no. This is a no-nonsense historical novel with a very serious tone and heavy themes. It's about war and battles and strategy and putting down rebellions. It's about friendship and trust and honor and keeping one's word. It's about a man driven to make his mark on history and the people who gradually learned to believe in him, trust him, and follow him, helping him go from a beleaguered warlord to the leader of a stable regional power to the sovereign of a whole nation.

It was pretty fun to read, but not super fun. I didn't relish every page. However, there is nothing I could point to and say should have been edited out or abridged, and overall I'm glad I read it. Yes, I wish it moved a little quicker or varied in tone a bit more, but maybe it's better this way--leaning more toward an educational work of scholarship. This is no textbook, though; it's a novel, and I think a good one. Perhaps the greatest pleasure I've gotten from it is having a fuller picture of the historical setting and the Norman Invasion, filling in a picture that has been very sketchy most of my life.

So, yes, recommended.

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The Golem and the Sad Girl

The Book of Splendor by Frances Sherwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this quite a bit. 4 stars.

In part, this is the story of a young woman who falls in love with a golem, and that's my favorite part of the story. Rochel is a marginalized young woman in the Jewish quarter of Prague in the early 17th century. As a child of rape, she looks different and is treated different, though a decent man makes her his wife. He's not a bad guy, but he has blind spots that leave Rochel feeling unseen and unloved. (He does love her. He just isn't good at it.) When threats from the intolerant Christians make them fear for their lives, the rabbi creates a golem (a story which is repeated in legend and is here treated as fact). The golem can't speak but he's intelligent and sensitive, and he definitely sees Rochel.

I would have liked more of their story. They're together on the page too little. The other characters are also interesting, but lead nowhere. We have the Holy Roman Emperor, who's crazy and wants to live forever; Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler; the alchemist John Dee; doctors; spies; a rag and bone man who is one of the heroes of the story; Vaclav, the bastard son of the emperor who serves him though the emperor has no idea who he is; and more. As much as I enjoyed them, most of their stories peter out, with their endings coming off-stage or omitted altogether. We don't get the scene when Kelley is hanged. We don't see when Kirakos and Sergey escape to South America. The final scene with Vaclav and the emperor on the sands by the river seem to hint at something, but I don't know what. And Rochel's story, with her husband, has a logical conclusion, but we skip most of the events that get us there.

It was fun to read, but a little frustrating in the end. I can appreciate the excellent prose, and there's an entertaining plot filled with memorable characters, but the loose threads and skimpy conclusion didn't entirely satisfy. I usually feel like books are longer than they should have been; I think this one could have used another hundred pages.

Anyway, I still liked it.

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Where Zorro Gives Them the Slip

The Mark of Zorro by Johnston McCulley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is very entertaining old pulp fiction novel.

Zorro--meaning tv shows and movies and tie-in kids' books, etc--was already old in the 60s when I was little, and always seemed dated to me. I didn't ever try to look into anything related to Zorro because I didn't think I'd enjoy it. But then I got curious when I found the Isabel Allende version, interested in the history (real and fictional) and culture of the region before California was part of America. The Allende version was, for me, super boring and disappointing, so I had to see if the original was better.

I think it is.

It has fewer pretensions, which is an advantage. This is meant to entertain. You can tell he wasn't expecting write a sequel, let alone a bunch of them, so he was putting it all in this one story. Zorro is bigger than life, flamboyant, risk-taking, and very capable, though not quite a superhero. There's a lot of action, a lot of sword fights and chases on horseback and highwayman tricks, and there is a bit of romance and even a few laughs. The good guys are very good and most of the bad guys are very bad, though he does have a few sympathetic guys in the middle. It's genuinely fun.

It has flaws for sure. The author isn't too particular about the exact history of the time, and he doesn't show a lot of modern awareness of human rights and equality. However, it seems like his heart is in the right place. (Or Zorro's is.) The natives' treatment is considered important, and Zorro wants to protect them, but the story seems to uphold a pretty rigid hierarchy, with hidalgos at the top, peasants (including mestizos, apparently) next, and natives at the bottom. The author seems to be okay with keeping those distinctions, just with a little more fairness applied.

Still, considering he wrote it in 1919, it leans more toward justice than the society he was part of, IMO.

The plot is really just Zorro annoying corrupt politicians and embarrassing soldiers while defending simple people. In the midst of that, Diego Vega, the unmasked Zorro, is wooing a rich young woman who wishes Diego were more like Zorro. His escapes get more and more unlikely until we get to the conclusion, when his survival appears impossible. The existence of sequels makes one hope he does, in fact, survive the final trap.

If you sometimes like old pulp novels, give Zorro a try. I'm gonna go look for those sequels.

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Where Scott Meets Dickens and Austen

St. Ronan's Well: The Works of Sir Walter Scott by Walter Scott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a deep cut.

Nobody reads this as their first Sir Walter Scott novel. But if you like his books, as I do, I expect you'll like this one. It stands out, though. It's odd in a way.

The most curious thing about St. Ronan's Well is that Scott set out to write a "watering hole" novel. Think Bath, as it appears in other authors' novels of manners. Or think Sanditon: a little resort, frequented by an odd assortment of well-off (fairly well-off, most of them) idlers enjoying the spa while it is still rather new. It feels like it's going to become popular, but right now it's still mostly the early adopters hanging out, annoying each other.

He mentions in his introduction the authors Burney, Austen (misspelled, though!), Edgeworth, and Charlotte Smith, who have had success in this area, and refers to his own temerity at attempting to enter their field. I think he's done something interesting here, but it isn't quite the same thing as those authors. He still writes something closer to a romance than a novel of manners. The characters have Dickensian names like Bingo Banks, Lady Penelope, Dr. Quackleben, Captain MacTurk, Mr. Winterblossom, and the like, and their personalities are exaggerated in a typical 19th Century novel way. The plot through the middle of the novel feels like it's going to be mostly about the clash of personalities and small grievances, maybe even played for laughs, but it gets more serious.

In fact, it gets a little gothic, kinda, with the FMC being a bit off, maybe crazy, but super sweet, trying to quietly survive in a world that did her wrong, hiding away in a crumbling old house. Over time, we learn her secrets, along with those of her brother, her one-time lover, his rival, an eccentric clergyman, and a world-traveling visitor who gets in everyone's business. There are lies and tricks and wills with strange stipulations and fake marriages and every kind of intrigue you could imagine.

Forgive the spoiler--or skip ahead--but it doesn't end happily, and I was disappointed in that. I would have called this a 5-star read that I'd want to come back to if all the secrets had emerged one day sooner, and all the good guys ended up with HEA's. Okay, yeah, I still enjoyed it, but I didn't like the sour note at the end, and I doubt I'll ever read it again. Life's too short to get bummed out by a sad story.

(In fact, I *literally* don't understand why so many people sign up to read things they know are devastatingly sad. Share them with friends. Read them in groups. Read them twice. I don't get that. To me, it's like enjoying a meal--maybe it's pretty good, maybe it's up and down, but you're still enjoying it--and you're especially looking forward to the desert, but when you get to it, it's sawdust and broken glass. Sadness. Disappointed hopes. Lives ended too soon. Ack!)

(I might be overstating it some, but do you get me?)

Anyway.

That all said, I still enjoyed reading the book. It got heavier and darker toward the end, diverging from its novel of manners beginning, but it was still entertaining and weird and pretty fun.

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Where Nothing Good Happens. At All.

Chronicles of the Canongate: The Highland Widow; The Two Drovers by Walter Scott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There's always something to enjoy in Sir Walter Scott's stories, so I enjoyed these somewhat, but they're the least interesting of any of his writing so far that I have read.

He does well describing a place and time, making you see a world different than they one you're living in. That always has value. The hovel in the wilderness where the highland widow, the long-bereaved wife of a feared marauder, lives out her lonely years makes a deep impression. It's a sad view, but well drawn. And the description of cattle drovers, how they lived and how they performed their duties, is the answer to some questions I never posed but was glad to learn about nonetheless.

However, neither story is a real pleasure to read. Sorry (not sorry) for the spoilers, but they're sad, discouraging stories that only serve to make me appreciate so much more those stories with happy endings. I seldom start and less frequently finish books or movies that end in sadness. (I took a date to see Tess of the D'urbervilles once. That was horrible. Long and horrible.) Good people do stupid, bad things that ruin several lives at once. Ack. No, I am no fan of tragedies.

These two stories would have been a little more palatable if they hadn't been embedded in a tedious framing device, where the narrator, a man called Chrystal Croftangry, describes the manner in which he acquired the tales he was about to tell us. He does this only after relating much of his biography, none of which is to the point at all. (This is not the same narrator found in the Waverley novels. These Canongate stories came out after Sir Walter Scott stopped calling his books "By the author of Waverley" and everyone knew who was actually writing them.) The long introduction by the narrator is over 80 pages, almost half of the whole, and I don't recommend it to anyone.

Anyway, though I always enjoy reading Scott, this was the least pleasurable to date, and I hope the short novel included in the same volume is more like his other writing.

Recommended only for true Scott fans, and even then I dunno....

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Where Lady Jane Grey Falls to Queen Mary

The Tower of London by William Harrison Ainsworth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Tower of London, published in 1840, is a medieval romance historical fiction novel set in 1553, and virtually all action takes place at the castle in the title. It is written in the high ornate style of the time, very similar to the tone and style of Sir Walter Scott, and it compares favorably with his writing. I liked it. It's very entertaining, full of lots of surprises, and informative. A great deal of it is fiction (I mean, there are ghosts), but there's a lot of concrete factual information found here, too, and it was an education.

From the title, it is clear that Ainsworth is partly telling the story of a place. In the same way that Hugo, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, incorporated direct instruction into the layout of Paris and especially the famous cathedral, Ainsworth takes pains to instruct the reader in the various towers, throne rooms, dungeons, and other buildings on the site of the Tower of London. In fact, it becomes obvious that some of the action is included just so that he has an excuse to lead us to another interesting chamber. He literally stops telling the story to describe the construction and history of each location, directly addressing the reader. It is less distracting than it sounds; I found it mostly quaint.

His second purpose in the novel is to give us the story of Lady Jane Grey. The story begins with her arrival at the Tower as a new queen and follows her and those around her to the day of her death on the scaffold. (Sorry--spoiler.) The author is a gifted historian but also a gifted storyteller, and he supplies the reader with a lot of speculation, private conversation, intrigue, and invention to fill in the blank parts of the record. In addition to the main story of plotters and ambassadors and soldiers, he tells the story of many lesser characters in the castle, including their drinking and feasting and fighting and laughing. His favorites are three giants (supposedly bastards of Henry the VII) and a little person named Xit who is combative and proud, all of whom the author had enormous affection for. (Xit is like a smaller and even more foolish Falstaff who is more fortunate in his friends than the doomed Shakespeare character and lands on his feet after making a fool of himself, eventually receiving a knighthood.) The feasts are described in probably too much detail, but you know how they love their food in tales of the time.

Lady Jane Grey is made sympathetic, and even though you know perfectly well what's gonna happen to her, it's hard not to hope something will intervene. Queen Mary comes off as, well, bloody and vindictive, though not completely, and Elizabeth is treated as kinda complicit and kinda manipulated--but lucky. The men around these women are all ambitious and don't have enough sense to quit destroying themselves and everyone who loves them. Now, that sounds horrible, but the mix of melodrama and comedy and, here and there, gothic romance keeps the story from being too much of any one thing. Some folks won't like that; I did.

Again, those who liked anything by Hugo or Dumas or Scott are likely to find the writing of Ainsworth--language, plotting, characters, themes--similar enough to see a lot to like in this or another of his novels. Anyway, I did.

Recommended.

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Where I Adore the Angry Dracula Lady

And I Darken by Kiersten White
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the first novel I've read by Kiersten White, and I thought it was terrific. I loved it.

I've always had an interest in the story of the "real" Dracula, the Wallachian prince raised in the Ottoman court, and there have been some (for me) close misses, but this is almost dead center. It is a retelling and a reimagining, with Vlad gender-swapped as Lada, a young princess instead of a prince, but this just makes the story more interesting. In all the ways that matter, the author has presented the history of the time in an accurate and comprehensible way, and that's what I have been looking for.

Meanwhile, she tells an excellent character-based story. Lada is a hard, driven, angry creature who is so selfish she seems cruel. Her unkindness to her younger brother, especially in their early youth, makes her almost unsympathetic, though she's exciting to watch, the way she insists on being tougher than everybody else. But as we get to know her, we realize that she cares deeply about her homeland, craves the approval of her father, and loves her brother, even if she's usually dismissive of him. She eventually grows to respect him to a degree, and they grow closer.

Lada is humanized most when she and her brother, sent to be hostages at court, become close to Mehmed, the prince and heir to the Ottoman throne. Though despises the Ottomans, especially at first, she finds a lot to appreciate. Lada trains with the Janissaries, earning their respect, then falls in love with Mehmed and even saves his life. Still, she never stops being angry and prickly and dangerous. The way the author makes us believe all of these things about this complex young woman is what I love most about the book.

Radu, her brother, has a whole different arc, and it's just as believable and just as crucial to the story.

I found the book compelling and am eager to see the concluding volumes. This is a Dracula I want to read more about.

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Historical Action Romance

Omar Khayyam by Harold Lamb
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Harold Lamb is not an obscure ancient writer; he wrote mostly between the world wars and was well received at the time, here and in the Middle East where many of his novels were set. But I had never heard of him and only discovered him by accident.

Now I read his writing with keen interest.

He is primarily a historian and translator, but he's one of those uncommon scholarly men who can write an engaging novel based on all the history he knows. His characters are complex, his language is a nice mix of direct and figurative, his story moves along quickly, and even though he wrote 80 or 90 years ago, there's little sign of chauvinism or intolerance. He knows his settings and is clearly sympathetic to his subjects.

I thought Khayyam was a poet, and he is, but as I learned here he really was a brilliant scientist and mathematician. (Those who don't know should google him.) His polymath achievements remind me of Galileo and Copernicus other such geniuses who saw beyond the limits of their culture and religion, glimpsing deep truths that they couldn't safely show the rest of the world. Or they paid for it if they did. The book made me curious about the real man behind the story, and then it made me a fan. A thousand years too late, perhaps, but a fan still.

The story told here is a fictionalized imagining of Khayyam's life, as the records are too few to really know enough about him, but it's great multicultural story of adventure and love and courage, with war and Assassins (capital intended) and kings and fortunes. One could change a few names and imagine it to be pure historical fiction about an imaginary character and enjoy it that way, but the broad strokes of the story are true and the reality impressive. Details and action are invented, but the man was real. And so was his poetry, apparently.

The author demonstrates a soft spot for iconoclasts and pot-stirrers, but he also shows sympathy for the common man and is sensitive to believers in a way that is surprisingly modern. Omar Khayyam might mock the blindness of faith; the author does not. With the perspective of the historian, he describes and demonstrates without offering judgment. That's how it felt to me, anyway.

Recommended for readers of history as well as those who favor romantic adventure stories. The historical notes at the end are helpful for those like me who are interested.

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Sir Walter Scott's First Album

Waverley by Walter Scott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Figure 8 was the first Elliott Smith album I bought, the first I was aware of, and I loved it. When I got a chance, I bought the one he made a couple years before that, XO, and it didn't strike me *quite* the same, but I liked it, and came around on it. I worked my way back, over time, to his self-titled album, which was the least like the first one of his I bought. It was a very different sound and I didn't take to it at first. It was like meeting him at his most mature, most creative, most capable, and walking back in time to his most raw. But I recognized in it a lot of the same things I loved about Figure 8 and the other albums and learned to hear it a different way.

That's how I feel about this novel.

Having read a number of his later novels, I found some of this less polished, more awkward, and I was put off a bit by it. But you can trace elements of the later novels back to this one, his first, and see how he evolved, how he was feeling his way forward, toward the author that he would be. Framed this way, a story I might not have cared (if it had been the first of his I opened) still works, still makes sense, and is entertaining.

It contains many of the same themes and motifs--the history of Scotland, the fortunes of great families, the contrast between highlanders and lowland Scots, acts of bravery, lives devoted to honor, the use of realistic dialect, and my favorite, the humanizing and ennobling of marginalized and handicapped individuals. (Davie Gellatley, the mentally handicapped servant boy, is one of several examples in the novel. Though unsuitable for some work, he's shrewd enough, in an amusing way, to fail at anything other than the work he enjoys, so that he's not pressed into jobs he doesn't like, but is good at the ones he does like. And he shows characteristics of a savant, recalling and being able to sing every verse of every song his older brother taught him, in a number of languages, which I found interesting in a 200-year-old novel. Because he likes delivering messages, he's entirely reliable when given that sort of errand, and carries some important messages. Not a big part, but memorable.) Set during the Jacobite Rebellion, the novel is a romantic action story for the most part, and pretty fun to read just on that level.

It's a bit weird, though. Scott usually has an intrusive (I mean that in a neutral way) narrator, the "Let me tell you, dear reader..." type of narrator. Here, though, it seems we get Scott himself as the narrator, and he tells us way too much. He basically walks us through the thinking he did when constructing the plot and devising the characters. It's almost like watching a movie that pauses the action and turns to the director who tells us how he framed the shot or explains why the character is doing what he's doing. That does something to the suspension of disbelief; I won't say it destroys it, but it does wash it out quite a bit. (Actually, it makes me think of Peter Falk in Princess Bride. But that worked in a different way.)

Despite the odd narrator, this first effort still impresses with its round characters. In Edward Waverley, we get a hero not unlike many of Scott's later heroes. In Baron Bradwardine, a family friend, who is both noble and ridiculous, always quoting Latin passages and bits of Scottish law, we get a preview of Lord Oldbuck in his 3rd novel, The Antiquary. And with Fergus Mac-Ivor and a few others, we see the noble character living outside the law. They're not just types, though; they're all original creations with their own style. Even in his first novel, he's already capable of that.

So it's rough, in a way, but it has its charm, and I'm grateful to the novel. Without it, we wouldn't have all the other novels. He almost didn't finish it, and when he did he published it anonymously, not wanting to diminish his career as a poet. But it sold very well and he went on to Rob Roy and Ivanhoe and the rest, so yay for Waverley.

In 2021, this is an enthusiast's book. Others should start with one of his later novels. But I recommend finding a lovely old hardcover somewhere and reading at least one of them!

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I Finally Learn Who Roland Was

Swords of Anjou by Mario Andrew Pei
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an older book--1953--but it's written in the style of much older books, romances such as those Don Quixote would have read, and I enjoyed it.

It is the story, more or less, of Roland from The Song of Roland. Charlemagne and his army are leaving Spain after forcing Zaragoza to surrender, and as they reach the passes through the Pyrenees, the defeated army attacks the rearguard and kills them all, including the famous Roland. The main army returns and defeats Zaragoza once more. The author adds characters from other tales and invents a few more to add love stories and subplots, making them the main characters in the story, following a tradition (according to the author in the historical note at the end) of retelling the Roland story with embellishments and a change of focus. I like that kind of invention and retelling; I enjoy the many forms of Sherlock and Wizard of Oz and Robin Hood and Cinderella; I think that's a fun way to renew a story, and I think it works here.

The author keeps his characters true to the times, which sometimes is annoying. The misogyny and narrow-mindedness and religious bigotry of middle age men is wearisome. That's not his fault--people were horrible, then as now--but 2019 me wants them to learn a lesson. Alas.

It is a fun story, though, if we can overlook our heroes' painful flaws. They also have admirable strengths. The courage and loyalty on display here are as impressive as the chauvinism is disappointing. It is inspiring to see men (and women, in some cases) sacrifice everything for a principle. After seven years, I want to go home, but I will fight on. I will give up the love of my life to serve my nation. The reader has to wonder--would I be able to sacrifice so much for a vow I made, for a principle I believe in?

I dunno.

So--problematic characters seem to reflect problematic times, not a problematic author. But YMMV. I liked the book, the story, the history.

Recommended.

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