SHIELD WAAALLLL!
The TV version of The Last Kingdom is hammy as all heck. It alternates from all too earnest dialogue between breathless period-dressed persons to fourth-wall breaking winks at the camera. Judging from the actor’s bodies, the Vikings entered the show immediately following a raid on a crossfit gym. The show has a loose grip on time passing and a character who was a baby in one episode is a teenager in another without the rest of the cast aging. It’s often melodramatic when it intends to be merely dramatic.
Yet, it’s fun. It’s well-paced in an era of TV that finds delight in dragging a plot point over seven episodes, revealing it bit by tiny bit in each, when it could have been resolved in two. The Last Kingdom never ends an episode with the cast anywhere remotely near where they started. While the history feels goofy at times, at others it is genuinely enthralling. The 9th century is not often represented on screen and sometimes the show really takes you there, makes the character’s lives feel believable, and teaches you a thing or two. So, I enjoy watching it. Not enough to run out and buy the novels, but recently when I was vacationing on Cape Cod, I went to the bookstore and I guess Cornwell lives on the cape because all eleven (!) Saxon Tales were present. Thus I accepted that The Last Kingdom was now my beach read and here we are.
The novel closely follows its first-person narrator Uhtred, son of Uhtred. He begins the novel as an English child, but it’s the mid-9th century and the Danes are invading. Following the defeat of his lordly father by the invaders, Uhtred is orphaned and adopted by a pagan lord. His inner conflict over whether or not he is English or Danish runs deeply through both show and novel. His English birthright combined with his Danish martial training catapults him into national events and eventually into the company of several historical figures, chief among them King Alfred the Great.
The prose is crisp and like the show, fast moving. Uhtred is narrating the story as an old man and the novel buys deeply into this framing. He speaks directly to the reader. He admits his memories aren’t perfect, forgets some things and embellishes others. It’s interesting the way Cornwell dispenses with the notion that stories should be shown, not told. There is an immense amount of telling in this novel. Uhtred marries his first wife and tells us he can barely remember her face, suggesting she is not going to live all that long. Their first meeting shows her repulsed by him, but their relationship grows… completely offscreen. Uhtred summarizes it with a handful of sentences such as “We grew close” or “We suited each other”. This is intentionally done because Cornwell isn’t afraid to zoom in close on a battle scene or landscape and rattle off an evocative metaphor. I liked it. I think. I just wouldn’t want too much of it at a time.
The world is brutal and Cornwell via Uhtred wants you to know it. People die young and often and childbearing is extraordinarily dangerous. Girls are married at thirteen. Law and church are fickle but all-powerful. Unlike Game of Thrones, there is rarely graphic detail. There’s stabbing and marshes red with blood but the specificity ends there. Sex is always in the past tense and in scarce detail. The front cover boasts a quote from George R. R. Martin praising Cornwell’s battle scenes. Eh, they’re alright. He’s good at visualizing the events, but when Uhtred’s stabbing dudes left and right and going into his ‘battle haze’ or w/e it is, I’m generally rolling my eyes. A younger me would have appreciated this more.
Like the show, the history is fascinating. It does an excellent job of demonstrating that “English” is really a combination of many peoples. Saxons and Britons and Danes and Scottish tribes and more. Cornwell knows how to inject history lessons into the text without being obtrusive. I learned a plethora of details on how people in the 9th century lived. I learned that ‘viking’ is more of a verb than a noun and only used when Northmen were raiding, not when they were trading or traveling or simply living (then they’d be Danes or Pagans). Cornwell has a historical note at the end that explains that yes, much of this did happen and yes, the Danes did nearly conquer all English lands save for Wessex, the Last Kingdom itself.
All together, I enjoyed myself, but frankly not enough to leap right into part two. I’ll continue watching the show and maybe on my next vacation or long plane flight, I’ll return to the literary version of Uhtred’s England.
The Scrying Orb 