The Last Kingdom, Bernard Cornwell

The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell is a book that I picked up to hear during my commute.  I was browsing the CDs in the library and saw his most recent in this series.  This book, the first, was not on the shelves so I ordered it and listened.

Started:  3/1/2012
Completed:  4/22/2012
Recommendation:  Loved it!  The audio version is awesome and the actor who does the reading takes me to a whole other level.
Recommended by:  Nobody
Review:


This first book in a substantial series follows the life of an English Lord from his earliest years as a prisoner of the Danes through his first major battle as an Englishman.  The cadence and pace of the story has a visceral quality that, when combined with the unflinching description of the times, brings the reader to a new place in an old time.  The stench of unwashed bodies follows each scene and the horror of hand-to-hand combat leaps from the page.  The romance that is present (it is rare) is not gushy, but has more of a hard edge to it and throughout the book in any circumstance, we don't live every moment as the first person narrative might.  There is a certain distance that is maintained with an occasional glimmer of the person inside the narrator in both predictable and unpredictable ways.

If you can get past all the death (and there is plenty of it) the book has a certain desperate liveliness to it.  There is a hunger for life that helps carry the imagination and the little details that the author has added from scraps of actual history help build a scaffolding for the story that makes it believable.  This is no sword-and-sorcery tale, more of a fleshing out of a nasty story that could possibly have been (but certainly wasn't).  The hard-edge story telling reminds me of Morgan Llewellyn.