The Page Count

Tag: Fiction

  • Sword Song

    Rosemary Sutcliff, 1997 

    Red Fox Classics, 2001 

    272 pages 

    Read December 2023 

    Historical fiction, YA fiction 

    *Spoilers* 

    Bjarni, exiled from his settlement for five years for breaking an oath (and only indirectly for committing manslaughter), proceeds to make his way through the Viking world as a mercenary and sailor. What with being a solid Norse lad, this entails the expected abundance of seafaring and feuds. However, Sword Song was not entirely the picture of Viking life that I expected; Scandinavia is eschewed in favour of Viking settlements in the Celtic nations, and the non-martial aspects of Viking life, whilst not foregrounded, are given more space than I anticipated. 

    The slightly old-timey dialogue (‘Is it well with the bairn?’) and the use of placenames of yesterday (‘the Outer Isles’ for the Outer Hebrides and ‘Sutherland’ for the Highlands) lends it a feel of a time before lore, when homes were considered in a more fluid manner and certainly before the concept of a united kingdom. It is not always initially exactly clear where the story is taking place and I enjoyed this defamiliarisation, placing us in our protagonist’s calf-skin boots through five years of adventuring. 

    Its emphasis on adventure makes it a YA book (I mean, look at that front cover), although, while the violence is not gratuitous, nor is it shirked from. In Bjarni’s universe, whilst not a given, death by violent means is readily accepted. In other ways, the richness of details, especially on nature and boats, makes it a gratifying read as an adult: ‘Just where moorland fell away to machair a stream came down from the higher ground, pushing its way through a narrow glen suddenly and unexpectedly choked with trees-a-tangle, birch and rowan and willow and thorn’. This appeal to more considered tastes tempers the pace and prevents it from devolving into the monotony of just being sword fight after sword fight, which, conversely, is what I found hard work when I first bought this when I was 11 or 12 (RRP: £4.99) and sword fighting was a lot more important to me than bucolic vistas. Upon picking it up (20 years-plus later) I half-expected to DNF it again. Instead, I very much found the opposite: the break-up of the sword fighting is what helps make it a compelling read. The abundant descriptions of nature and place-setting that Sutcliff incorporates into her descriptions, without being overwrought, emphasises how these were peoples of the land and of the sea, and in a way, nation builders.  

    It feels well-researched, or at the least, convincingly researched, and both Norse and Christian mythology are touched upon, although they are not central to Bjarni’s worldview. These religions coexist, but primitive, brutal and tribalistic traditions abound in all wheres; feuds, funerals, how animals are treated, going into battle. With all of that said, the underlying zeitgeist is of an incremental shift from paganism to Christianity – the bigger picture paired with the individual experiences of Bjarni. Sutcliff also doesn’t shy away from incoporating the Vikings’ penchant for taking thralls – or slaves – and how some people did not have a chance to make their own way through the world. 

    I would have liked it if there had been a bit more introspection on Bjarni’s part: earlier on in the book ‘he was well enough content, though still there was an ache in him somewhere like the ache of an old wound when the wind is from the east’, but this is pretty much it. He seems to take five years of what seems to be regularly scheduled drama in stride, and is apparently content to wander with rarely a trace of homesickness.  

    Towards the end, he reflects upon how his people call home wherever they lay their head: 

    And suddenly, he was realising something that he had not realised before; that while he come of a people who could uproot easily, whose home was as much the sea as the land [Anghared] was of another kind […] She was flung out into a strange world that held nothing familiar, a cold place; he could feel the cold in her. 

    But there is little talk of how this strange, cold world has affected him. How has he changed by the end? I’ve not read any of Sutcliff’s other books, but as this was published post-humously (I don’t know if that included any of the writing and editing process), I suspect that this may have contributed to this slight sense of underdevelopment. 

    Worth reading? Yes. 

    Worth re-reading? Yes. 

  • The Honourable Schoolboy

    John le Carré, 1977 

    Edition read: Penguin Modern Classics, 664 pages 

    Read: August – October 2025 

    Spy fiction 

    Part II of the Karla Trilogy.  

    *Spoilers* 

    The sequel to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the plot is set in motion by the dissemination of Bill Haydon’s act(s) of betrayal.* It’s now 1974 and George Smiley and Peter Guillam are rebuilding the secret service, here always referred to rather archly as The Circus. The reinstated intelligence analyst Connie Sachs revisits investigations that Haydon had suppressed and finds what looks to be a money-laundering operation centred in Hong Kong. 

    Jerry Westerby is called back to London from rural Italy (where he had bolted to when he found out that Haydon had possibly betrayed him to the Soviets), where he is writing a novel (‘me neither’), ostensibly on leave from his journalistic duties, in which capacity he is sent to Hong Kong to follow this lead. 

    And just this much of the plot, comprising just the set-up of the premise, is complicated enough. As with his characters, le Carré’s plotting and dialogue is sophisticated and worldly.** I will be honest and say that I couldn’t follow the plot through every single juncture; the amount of exposition is limited, people talk in jargon (or not at all), and the amount of trail covering and switching and deliberate wrongfooting by spies and their handlers is byzantine. Guillam’s perspective is the closest that there is to the reader’s, with Smiley even gently mocking him at one point for not being able to piece together just what the hell everyone is up to and what it all means. However, despite this density and length (I found it useful to keep a dramatis personae), it’s a page turner. Besides the human element (why do all of these clever, erudite people seem so wretched?), the reader has to find out the answers and to see where it’s all heading at the same pace (if not a bit behind) as the – oft highly resourceful – characters. It does wander into James Bond territory just a bit when it turns out that Westerby, besides being a journalist and spy, is an expert on racehorses.  Thankfully, Westerby – the titular honourable schoolboy – doesn’t turn out to be a winning jockey. By and large, instead of stunts, this is a world dominated by suspicion and sadness and full of fittingly distrustful and unhappy characters.   

    Worth reading? Yes. 

    Worth re-reading? Yes. Read the Smiley novels in sequence.** 

    ‘Not allowed a past in this game. Can’t have a future either.’

     

     

    *In an uncharacteristic bit of narrative leniency from le Carré, the first page provides all the exposition you need to bring you up to speed. However, I still recommend reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy beforehand. 

    **‘“The case has firmed up a little, so perhaps it would be sensible to fix a date. Give us the batting order and we’ll circulate the document in advance.” 

    “A batting order? Firmed up? Where ever do you people learn your English?”’ 

  • The Offing

    Benjamin Myers, 2019  

    Read: September 2024 – April 2025 (stuck in the book traffic jam) 

    Edition read: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020, 260 pages 

    Fiction – Bildungsroman 

    The plotline of The Offing is slightly more pedestrian than Myer’s more typical ‘Northern Gothic’ novels; working-class boy (Robert) from post-WW2 English mining town meets eccentric upper-class woman (Dulcie), who has retreated from society due to long-lost love, where they experience mild culture clash and she exposes him to the better things in life. 

    Told in the first person, the story takes an analeptic form, which somewhat explains the rich vocabulary, but for a narrator introduced as painfully ancient, he has a remarkable memory for details. Read this deliberately rich vocabulary with patience and the five senses get a workout; the colours, smells, feelings, sights and sounds of nature all feature regularly and prominently and there are some great turns of phrase (‘The ashen sea roared in the distance like a football stadium witnessing an extra-time injustice’). However, the plentitude of what I came to feel were overly frequent and verbose descriptions of nature did get monotonous. 

    There are two main sections – Robert by himself, which if anything is slightly more interesting, capturing the landscape(s) of northern England as he walks across it, and then when he encounters Dulcie. There is a subplot about poetry, which seems slightly meta – is Myers talking about how Northern working-class people aren’t supposed to like poetry, but if you take them out the pits, they do? 

    If there had been something else happen, it could have had a more compelling sense of drive; unfortunately, besides the over-the-top descriptions, the stakes just feel a bit low. 

    Worth reading? No, even though I came into this wanting to like it – Myers has written some brilliant books. 

    Worth re-reading? No. Myer’s other books – The Gallows Pole and These Darkening Days – however, are well worth a read.