This is quite old news already, but apparently Bernard Cornwell has finished another, fourth novel set in the Hundred Years War dealing with the battle of Agincourt (1415) and called ‘Azincourt’, which is French. For Agincourt.
I consider Cornwell on the whole an entertaining writer. He has a few excellent books (the Warlord Chronicles, particularly, which I consider among my favourite novels altogether) and a bunch of others that are okay, even if they merely seem an exercise in writing stories about individualistic warrior heroes facing up to (usually French) opponents from without and arrogant noblemen from within.
However, this new book seems to be a complete waste of time, as setting, characters nor prose seem to have anything new to offer. According to Bernard’s own site, the hero character is a longbowman (just like in the previous three HYW novels of Cornwell, although it is not the same person altogether as there’s a sixty year gap between that novel and this) with a massive longbow who quickly picks up a French girl he protects from evil villains, because he is a proper English hero.
Yawn.
Would it really be too much to ask to develop plotlines and characters? It seems Cornwell has merely grabbed the same characters from out of the freezer, pasted on a new name and face and dropped them in an ever so slightly different setting.
With the battle in mind (and subtly dropped into the title – think anyone might notice?), the book is bound to get high sales for that reason alone, and even more so because it is coupled to Cornwell’s name. However, I’m going to pass up on this one. I think I can dream it already… silly and martially ineffective Frenchmen (though at least one who will be sympathetic to our gallant hero), betrayal, love, arrows blotting out the sun, a cameo appearance of Henry V, etc.
But feel free to disagree with me; you can read a part of the book on Cornwell’s website here.
In other news, in a fit of joy after doing well at my recent exam, I bought and devoured The Reavers, George MacDonald Fraser’s last published novel before his death (and the only one readily available in Dutch bookstores, apparently) which is wonderful. It is set somewhere in the 1590’s, somewhere on the border between England and Scotland, where all is supposed to be quiet after peace has arrived. But not everything is as it seems, and the border is crawling with reavers (basically cattle raiders), English spies, Scottish spies, and Spanish villains plotting to re-catholicise the British Isles, starting with a daring operation codenamed Jimsnatch. The book is purposefully filled to the brim with anachronisms and insanity and is not a serious historical novel at all, and is all the better for it. All the characters are stereotyped to the extreme, from beautiful female lead Godiva Dacre to the pygmy Clnzh and the book even starts with a wonderful ‘It was a dark and stormy night in Elizabethan England, …’ after which the sentence rambles on for well over a page, explaining the extent of the storm and setting the scene (livestock being blown through roofs, small Essex villages whirling away, the usual). The book is worth the money for that sentence alone (try keeping a straight face reading it), though if you don’t like reading pure silliness you will probably consider it a waste of time.
I loved the Warlord Chronicle books as well but have read very little of the rest of Cornwell’s output. The others that I did read were fairly average with nothing too objectionable but nothing to write home about either.