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A review by misterjay
The Archer's Tale by Bernard Cornwell
4.0
Prior to this novel, the only Bernard Cornwell books I had read were The Saxon Chronicles. Those books are fast-paced, graphic, casually brutal, funny, and told from a first person perspective. The Archer's Tale is exactly the same only it's told from the third person omniscient perspective. And that's a little jarring.
As a reader, I get the feeling that if I were to read The Archer's Tale in first person form, I'd have a hard time differentiating Thomas from Uhtred. That's not necessarily a criticism, just something that stands out from an otherwise exemplary novel.
Cornwell notes in the afterword that all the battles were real. They were as bloody, as brutal, as non-glorious in real life as they were in the book. The English archer really was a fearsome military unit that allowed the English armies to swarm all over France in the beginning years of The Hundred Years Wars. Women were raped and abducted and treated as captured property, much as they have been throughout history.
All of this can make the books very hard to read in spots. And yet Cornwell presents us with such likable characters who go through their own changes and their own arcs that the book flies by, even while one chapter is filled with the horror of live in the middle ages and the next is equally filled with the crude, joyous humor of brothers-in-arms.
Really, if you're a fan of military and/or historical fiction, this is a must read. However, if you're at all squeamish about some of the more brutal realities of history, you may want to leave this story be.
As a reader, I get the feeling that if I were to read The Archer's Tale in first person form, I'd have a hard time differentiating Thomas from Uhtred. That's not necessarily a criticism, just something that stands out from an otherwise exemplary novel.
Cornwell notes in the afterword that all the battles were real. They were as bloody, as brutal, as non-glorious in real life as they were in the book. The English archer really was a fearsome military unit that allowed the English armies to swarm all over France in the beginning years of The Hundred Years Wars. Women were raped and abducted and treated as captured property, much as they have been throughout history.
All of this can make the books very hard to read in spots. And yet Cornwell presents us with such likable characters who go through their own changes and their own arcs that the book flies by, even while one chapter is filled with the horror of live in the middle ages and the next is equally filled with the crude, joyous humor of brothers-in-arms.
Really, if you're a fan of military and/or historical fiction, this is a must read. However, if you're at all squeamish about some of the more brutal realities of history, you may want to leave this story be.