The Last English King

The king is Harold, the loser of the Battle of Hastings, and his story is told by one of his bodyguards, Walt. Full of shame at having failed to save his lord, Walt embarks on a journey to the Holy Land, through countries plagued by marauding Turks (the First Crusade is not far off). He falls in with an ex-cleric Quint to whom he narrates his tale, a magician and his children and a red-headed trader in lapis lazuli who is not all she appears. The elucidation of the power politics of 11th-century England and Normandy is fascinating, as are the details of the social structures which underpinned them, and the many vignettes of everyday life. The story is earthy: as Rathbone points out in his introduction, this is hardly the place to be coy about Anglo-Saxonisms. The parallel story of Walt's journey is more compelling than the one he is telling, unfettered as it is by the constraints of history. This type of format always presents problems of anachronism, and of the need for the narrator within the story to explain things to the reader while at the same time apparently speaking to somebody who would be familiar with them. Rathbone makes a fair fist of this, but occasionally mars it by joining with his readers in a 20th-century 'we'. He also plays irritating cultural-reference games, such as introducing a busker who sings a song about how 'the answer to everything is blowing in the breeze', and giving Walt, the elite soldier, the motto 'winners dare'. That apart, it is an entertaining novel which combines two good stories. (Kirkus UK)