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A review by incrediblemelk
The White Mare by Jules Watson
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
slow-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
I always begin the year’s reading with light genre fiction, and I’d had this on my shelf for ages. It’s quite a chunky historical novel set during the Roman conquest of Alba (now Scotland). I had recently refreshed my taste for this period by watching the German series ‘Barbarians’ on Netflix, which I really appreciated because the Romans’ dialogue was actually in Latin rather than posh English accents. Here, everyone can conveniently speak British (Brythonic? Pictish?), even the Irishmen from Dalriada.
This book faces the problem that any narratives set during this time do: most archival evidence of them comes from Roman and Greek sources, or much later sources, while archaeology can only tell us so much, so the author has to fill the gaps with their own imaginative leaps.
I found Watson’s creative decisions more plodding than Ilka Tampke’s thematically very similar Songwoman (which tells the story of the conquest of Albion further south, and also follows a female healer and priestess who undertakes a political marriage to a stranger who turns out to be her love interest, and is undermined by a gross Druid who hates women’s power).
Tampke does a much better job of conveying the characters’ ties to country, how it might feel to embody the complex spirit-world, and the joy and mystery of ritual and song.
She’s also a more skilled writer than Watson, whose prose leans on certain stock phrases that I’ve read a lot in fantasy and romance writing:
Women always have “a mass of hair”;
Objects are “hefted” in people’s hands;
Sex happens “in the furs”;
Good-looking people are “comely”;
and there are so many “rutted cart tracks”. (Can’t these people smooth out their cart tracks? Well, I guess Rome ends up doing that…)
This is a very hefty book that follows the main characters for nearly two years, and it’s the first in a trilogy, so a lot of plot is left unresolved. The main storylines are “will the prince of Erin unite the tribes of Alba against the Roman invaders?” and “will the heroine recover from the trauma of her rape several years ago?”
I found it comforting to read but sometimes slow-paced. The dialogue in the fight scenes was a bit cringeworthy and expository, and the characters often took ages to realise things that had been hinted at much earlier on, e.g. that certain characters they trust are actually in league with Rome. This made me impatient with their slow wits. How can they not even identify the fucken evil Druid as their enemy, even at the end? They’re like, “well he’s just being anti.”
This book faces the problem that any narratives set during this time do: most archival evidence of them comes from Roman and Greek sources, or much later sources, while archaeology can only tell us so much, so the author has to fill the gaps with their own imaginative leaps.
I found Watson’s creative decisions more plodding than Ilka Tampke’s thematically very similar Songwoman (which tells the story of the conquest of Albion further south, and also follows a female healer and priestess who undertakes a political marriage to a stranger who turns out to be her love interest, and is undermined by a gross Druid who hates women’s power).
Tampke does a much better job of conveying the characters’ ties to country, how it might feel to embody the complex spirit-world, and the joy and mystery of ritual and song.
She’s also a more skilled writer than Watson, whose prose leans on certain stock phrases that I’ve read a lot in fantasy and romance writing:
Women always have “a mass of hair”;
Objects are “hefted” in people’s hands;
Sex happens “in the furs”;
Good-looking people are “comely”;
and there are so many “rutted cart tracks”. (Can’t these people smooth out their cart tracks? Well, I guess Rome ends up doing that…)
This is a very hefty book that follows the main characters for nearly two years, and it’s the first in a trilogy, so a lot of plot is left unresolved. The main storylines are “will the prince of Erin unite the tribes of Alba against the Roman invaders?” and “will the heroine recover from the trauma of her rape several years ago?”
I found it comforting to read but sometimes slow-paced. The dialogue in the fight scenes was a bit cringeworthy and expository, and the characters often took ages to realise things that had been hinted at much earlier on, e.g. that certain characters they trust are actually in league with Rome. This made me impatient with their slow wits. How can they not even identify the fucken evil Druid as their enemy, even at the end? They’re like, “well he’s just being anti.”