Agincourt by Bernard Cornwell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Doing the Devil’s Work with Beautiful Bows “On a winter’s day in 1413, just before Christmas, Nicholas Hook decided to commit murder.” That’s the choice opening line of Bernard Cornwell’s gritty historical novel Agincourt (2009). Hook, a 19-year-old forester for a minor lord, is patrolling for poachers when he sees at a distance the unsuspecting Tom Perrill, scion of the family his own family has been feuding with since Perrill’s grandfather killed Hook’s, and he immediately shoots an arrow that should skewer his foe, but due to a feather falling off in flight, the shaft goes astray. This sets in motion a chain of events in the prologue that has Hook going to London to assist in the hanging and burning of a group of “heretic” Lollards, punching a “black-hearted priest” (with bad teeth), failing to save a Lollard virgin from being raped and murdered, and finally leaving England as a mercenary archer to fight for Burgundy against France. Needless to say, Hook is a fine Cornwellian hero: laconic, brave, capable, and violent, a formidable fighter who’s no aristocrat and no saint but better by far than his vile Cornwellian nemeses. (Here Sir Martin and Tom Perrill are a little too ugly and awful.) The novel is a paean to longbowmen (“Archers were Hook’s heroes”), taking place during the 100 Years War between England and France, when the primacy of heavily armored aristocratic knights was being replaced by that of British archers, who were primarily tradesmen and had already won great victories at Crecy and Poitiers when Hook goes to the continent to become an archer. Henry V has decided to prove that God is on his side by invading France and forcing its rulers to accept his claim on the French throne. Although Cornwell depicts the almost universal brutality of the late middle-ages, he does render the French due for especial retribution for torturing and massacring English mercenaries and French nuns, while not depicting any equivalent British atrocities. There are many virtues in the novel: Salty speech, as when Hook’s patron Sir John curses the French (“turd-sucking sons of rancid whores!”) or lauds Hook (“Your mother wasn’t wasting her time when she spread her thighs, Hook”). Humorous conversations, as when Father Christopher tries to get Hook to take a historical perspective: “It all happened before,” Father Christopher told him. “Before?” “You don’t know your history, Hook.” “I know my grandfather was murdered and my father too.” “I do so love a happy family. But think back to your great-grandfather’s time.” Vivid depictions of warfare, like the beginning of the battle of Agincourt: “The first sound was the bowstrings, the snap of five thousand hemp cords being tightened by stressed yew, and that sound was like the devil’s harpstrings being plucked. Then there was the arrow sound, the sigh of air over feathers, but multiplied, so that it was like the rushing of a wind. That sound diminished as two clouds of arrows, thick as any flock of starlings, climbed into the gray sky. Hook, reaching for another broadhead, marveled at the sight of five thousand arrows in two sky-shadowing groups. The two storms seemed to hover for a heart’s beat at the height of their trajectory, and then the missiles fell.” Cornwell, needless to say, doesn’t shy away from graphic depictions of warfare, writing of gouged, sliced, and jellied eyeballs, ripped bellies and spilled guts, crushed helmets and burst brains, smashed bones and spurting blood, broken teeth driven to the back of their owner’s skull, slurries of blood, mud, and shit. Not to mention the ravages of dysentery. Yet he finds beauty in the tools of war, whether new poleaxes or a fine longbow: “There was a beauty there, a beauty of yew and hemp, of silk and feathers, of steel and ash, of man and weapon, of pure power, of the bow’s vicious tension that, released through fingers rubbed raw by the coarse hemp, shot the arrow to hiss in its flight and thump as it struck home.” Is this Cornwell’s war fetish? He calls war “the devil’s work,” but seems to relish it and to admire men who are good at it: “A square blunt face, scarred and broken, beaten by battle and by life but undefeated. It was a hard face, a warrior’s face, a man’s face.” Cornwell varies his war scenes, from sieges to pitched battles, and creatively depicts different ways to maim and kill people in the middle ages. However, as graphic scenes like this begin accumulating--“Hook was swinging the poleaxe as he landed and its lead-weighted hammer head crashed into a crouching Frenchman’s helmet and Hook sensed rather than saw the metal crumpling under the massive blow that collapsed metal, skull, and brain”—the violence begins to numb and bore like war porn. Mind you, it’s not all war! Interspersed with the mayhem appears some life philosophy, as when Father Christopher tells Hook, “Beware of certainty. . . . Beware of the man who says he knows God’s will.” There are vivid descriptions of things other than battle, as with “Branches as gaunt as scaffolds against the sky.” There are also plenty of interesting historical details, as with the French calling the English “the goddams” (perhaps because of how often the English utter that curse), Father Christopher saying that one bath per lifetime is enough because the clean body makes an unclean soul, Hook’s grandmother making fertility potions from mistletoe, mandrake root, and a mother’s urine, and people saying things like, “Sweet weeping Christ and all his piss drinking saints!” The audiobook reader Charles Keating is fine, though perhaps too old for the many war cries of “Kill them!” And the overly dramatic orchestra music barging in in mid-chapter (from when the book was on CDs?) is mood-breaking. People who like historical war fiction and are interested in the 100 Years War should like Agincourt. View all my reviews
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