This isn’t strictly speaking a spoiler review since I don’t actually say what happens in detail, but I do say what doesn’t happen which is potentially spoiler-y. With that in mind, if you haven’t read The Last Kingdom yet and would like your experience to be completely influence free then maybe save this review for later. It’s always better to safe rather than sorry, folks.
THE LAST
KINGDOM BY BERNARD CORNWELL
2004 • 355
pages (eBook) • Harper Collins
Ninth
century England. Danish warriors ruthlessly storm the English coast, killing
and plundering everything in their wake, invading each Kingdom in England and
taking it for themselves. All except one: Wessex still stands and it is the
fate of this Kingdom that will determine the course of history. Caught in the
midst of the invasion is Uhtred, son of an Anglo-Saxon Lord who is captured by
the Danes. Living freely as an Englishman among his adoptive Danish family,
Uhtred’s loyalties are constantly tested as England is plunged in to war.
I
finished The Last Kingdom in the early hours a little over a
day ago and since then I’ve been trying to weigh up how I feel about it. This
is historical fiction at its grittiest: there’s action and blood and Cornwell
doesn’t go sparingly on the detail. All of this is of course very good, it’s
exactly what I want from a historical novel to help me escape. At 355 pages
it’s not exactly a beast of a book, but a hell of a lot happens and it’s
amazing how Cornwell fits so much in to the story without stretching out the
page count considerably. The pacing and the timing are handled really well and
you can see Uhtred’s character grow and develop as the plot goes along.
The
narrative is told in first person from Uhtred’s perspective and I thought
Uhtred was actually a well-rounded protagonist. He felt real and flawed; he
wasn’t glossed over or crafted in to the perfect hero. Instead he helped
accentuate the complexities of human nature in the decisions he must make. In
that sense, the book is awesome. Some of the other characters felt a little
flat – Mildrith comes in much later in the story and although you understand
Uhtred’s feelings toward her, she herself felt underdeveloped. I liked her
because Uhtred liked her, and she never really came in to a
character of her own. Maybe in the next book we’ll see a bit more of her. Brida
was fun, but her part also felt a bit show-and-tell. Alfred however, was great.
I really felt the complexity of his character and it will be interesting to see
how his story for greatness unfolds throughout the rest of the series.
The bone
I have to pick with this book lies not with the premise of the story, but with
the way it’s executed. Uhtred’s narration is told retrospectively, in that it
is an older, wiser Uhtred who is telling the reader his story. Cornwell’s
decision to tell the story in this method simply lets us know that he knows
exactly what’s going to happen to his main character before it actually occurs.
Which is fine, it’s good for an author to know where his story his going, but
this meant that I was constantly aware that no matter what bloodshed, no matter
how close Uhtred comes to death, I ultimately knew that he would live to tell
the tale.
You may
be thinking, but hey it’s a given that the main protagonist will live,
especially if it’s written in the first person. Yes, this is usually true and
there are plenty of other books out there where the protagonist survives, but
this only served to remind me that Uhtred will manage to endure whatever
Cornwell throws at him and that kind of watered down the tension for me. There
were times when Uhtred would meet somebody for the first time, and go on to say
something like, “and I still liked them many years later” or “that was the
first time I met such-a-body, and I didn’t know what it meant then”. Occasionally
this made me think “Great! This person is going to be important later on, I
wonder what happens…” but mostly it just once again reminded me that someone
was going to survive –at least for a bit longer – and come out of whatever
shit-fest was about to go down.
I just
wanted to get lost in the story a little more, for the narrative to give me a
chance to kind of forget that Uhtred will survive – it would have made the
dangers he faced a little more dangerous. The story itself is great, there’s a
lot of historical detail which is awesome and lots of battles and action which
is equally great so points to Cornwell for that. It didn’t ‘wow’ me as much as
I had hoped though.
Overall
rating: 3 stars
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