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Loading... The Lion Wakes (2011)by Robert Low
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It is 1296 and Scotland is in turmoil. The old king, Alexander III, has died after falling off his horse one dark and stormy night. Scotland's future is in peril. Edward I of England, desperate to keep control of his northern borders, arranges for John Baliol, a weak man who Edward knows he can manipulate, to take leadership of Scotland. But unrest is rife and many are determined to throw off the shackles of England. Among those men is Robert the Bruce, darkly handsome, young, angry and obsessed by his desire to win Scotland's throne. He will fight for the freedom of the Scots until the end. But there are many rival factions and the English are a strong and fearsome opponent. THE LION WAKES culminates in the Battle of Falkirk which proves to be the beginning of a rivalry that will last for decades... No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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However, I had a strange time with the book, in that I quickly felt that the contents were less adventurous than the style, and I even had a sense of incongruity. So... I read for how he wrote rather than what he wrote, and I wished he’d go further, stretch expectations in other ways... This one is obviously a departure from a more standard kind of style – I know his ‘Whale Road’ isn’t much like this. There was a repetition of imagery that wore on me, though I bet you can argue that’s the building-up of a feel for the novel.
It’s on the grimy side in atmosphere, and I’m not talking Bruce and Wallace – whose history I scarcely know, though both began to interest me here as (partly-drawn as yet) characters – but the world and the people in it were anti-romantic. There’s the Dog Boy to latch your sympathies onto, and Hal, both fictional and less-important-people – the Dog Boy doesn’t even have a name. And the Auld Templar had a tarnished kind of glory to him, I think?
I admired other things. He made random deaths hard-hitting – not because the people were likeable, in fact they were very average specimens of humanity, nevertheless you saw them alive a few pages back.
Have to mention the languages. What with Scots, French, English and other, these people were only half-intelligible to each other, and he finds brilliant and funny ways to portray that. Don’t be anxious about the languages: he translates for you when you need a translation, and if he doesn’t you don’t need to know.
It was hard to review. But I was enchanted by those early scenes and his ‘rules? what rules?’ approach to the writing. The only rule is whatever works, and to a large extent this worked for me.