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Cargando... Conquerorpor Stephen Baxter
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. As a friend of ancient Rome, I read and liked the previous book of the series, the Emperor. In comparison, I must say that this book was something of a disappointment. This might be purely due to the fact that IMO, the medieval British Isles can't compete with ancient Rome. However, I also felt that the plot was crawling on very slowly, and since my primary interest in reading this book was to find out what happens next in the long term and not reading about the thoughts of some generic medieval monk or viking, I felt very bored at times. In short, I still want to know how it all ends and for that reason I will probably wade through the next volume, but now I will be more prepared for the tedium. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
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Interweaving the stories of ordinary people caught up in momentous events CONQUEROR tells the story of a desperate battle to keep alive a prophecy kept by the last Roman left alive in the shadows of Hadrian's wall. The prophecy tells of an invasion by dragons a new Christian king and the establishment of an Aryan empire that will last 10,000 years. It is a story that begins in 600Ad and ends with the crowning of a new king at Westminster in 1066. In the years in between the prophecy is handed down through the centuries. It is hidden away by the monks at Lindisfarne, lost in a Viking raid, found again. From desperate rivalries amongst the monks at Lindisfarne, to the terror of the Viking raids against Northern England to vicious intrigues at the courts of Harold and William the Bastard CONQUEROR charts the progress of a bid by the mysterious Weaver to influence the past from the far future. This is a fast moving historical thriller that casts a bright light onto a shadowy period of British history and brings it to vibrant life. Steeped in blood and violence this was also a time of artistic endeavour, a time of nation building and law-giving. And it is a time of chance, where history can be shaped by the Weaver . . . No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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Baxter keeps throwing hints into this book about one of his future projects, the Northland sequence that starts with 'Bronze Spring'. He also writes enough about the prophecy to give the reader doubts as to whether he is about to take us down an alternate history path or not; indeed, in the last third of the book, one of the main protagonists is trying very hard to bring about a different outcome to events, with the vision of a great counter-factual future history of an England tied into a northern league of explorers and traders, and there is the odd point where it almost looks as though he might bring it off. He doesn't, of course; we have a Prologue in Westminster Abbey at the coronation of William I on Christmas Day 1066 to show that the course of our history remains unperturbed. But just occasionally, the reader might be forgiven for thinking we are going to go that way...
The historical background is well drawn; the account of the battle of Stamford Bridge in particular has a great immediacy about it. It should be noted that many of his characters lead nasty, brutish and short lives, and Baxter does not shy from the violence of the times, often in considerable detail. And the attitudes of his medieval characters are properly depicted without any attempt to redraw them in modern terms; for example, when Harold is tricked into swearing allegiance to William, Duke of Normandy on a holy relic, he is told "An oath achieved under duress is not binding" but no-one believes that and they continue to act accordingly. Today, we would accept that argument; in the eleventh century, no-one did.
At the same time, there are nods to the values of future years; after all, the original prophecy in 'Emperor' spoke of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", and the brigandage of the Normans is shown against the proto-democratic institutions of the Norsemen and the Anglo-Saxons. There is no doubt that Baxter considers that the Norman Conquest set the scene for the following thousand years of the British class system, and some of the characters view the coming fight against the Normans as one for the survival of a way of life. There are those today who would happily turn back the clock to pre-Norman methods of governance.
The onward progression of the story of the prophecy and the Weaver, the invisible force who may (or may not) be sending these prophecies, has a major diversion signalled; the next prophecy is revealed in advance of the ending of the book, and it takes a rather different form to those we have already seen. I shall look forward to tackling the next in the sequence. ( )