My review of "The Lantern Bearers"
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sutcliff_space[Originally posted at my journal.]
"The Lantern Bearers" has haunted me for nearly forty years. I discovered this historical novel during my sixteenth summer; rereading it now, I find passage after passage that inspired incidents in my own stories. The novel made its way into my very bones, shaping me as a writer and as a person.
These days, it seems that the only way in which great writers can be remembered is if someone makes a film of one of their books. In this way, a so-so 2011 movie called "The Eagle" has brought a new influx of readers to an author who assuredly should have never have been forgotten.
On purely stylistic grounds, I can think of few writers to match Rosemary Sutcliff. She is a poet who chose to write in prose. In this passage, which I have chosen entirely at random, she immerses her readers in the British landscape:
"It was full dark now, though the flat-topped clouds massing above the pass to the coast were still touched with rose-copper on their under-bellies. The air was without freshness, lying like warm silk over one's face, and the stars were veiled in faint thunder-wrack. Certainly there was a storm coming, Aquila thought, as he made his way round the curve of the hill below the inner rampart and plunged into the twisting cleft among the rocks. The thin silver plash of the water under the ferns sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness, and the faint honey scent of the blackthorn breathed up to him. Looking down as he scrambled lower, he saw the pale blur of the blossoms like foam on dark water, where the thorn trees leaned together over the little hollow in the rocks - and the pale blur of a face suddenly turned up to him."
Sutcliff's lyricism is pervasive. She is just as capable of beautiful wording when describing a cavalry charge:
"A great warning cry went up from the nearest ranks of the enemy, and snatching one glance over his shoulder, Aquila saw the flower of the British Cavalry sweeping towards them along the tawny slope. There was a swelling thunder of hooves in his ears, and the wild, high song of the hunting-horn as the great arrowhead of wild riders hurtled down upon the battle. At the shining point of the arrowhead, [the leader] swept by, his great white horse turned for a flashing moment to silver by the burst of sunlight that came scudding down the valley to meet him, the silver mane streaming over his bridle arm, and the sods flying like birds from the great round hooves. . . . Just for the one instant they were there, seen out of the corner of the eye, with the white, fierce brilliance of figures seen by lightning; then they were past, and the following Cavalry thundered after, to hurl themselves into the Cavalry of [the enemy] - into them and through them, scattering them as dead leaves scatter before a gust of wind, and on."
The concreteness of her description evokes a long-ago world, as does the care with which she crafts the characters' dialogue. (In her essay "History is People," Sutcliff spoke disparagingly of a certain modern trend in historical fiction: "Personally, I find it destroys the atmosphere when a young Norman Knight says to his Squire, 'Shut ip, Dickie, you're getting too big for your boots.'") In "Combined Ops," an essay she wrote about how she came to create "The Lantern Bearers," Sutcliff names her main historical guides as two books by Trelawney Dayrell Reed: "The Battle for Britain in the Fifth Century" and "The Rise of Wessex." I leave it to others who know more than I do about British history to say how historically accurate her novels were at the time she wrote them. All I can say is that, at the level of myth, they provided me with a framework that I continue to build upon.
"The Lantern Bearers," which won the Carnegie Medal in 1959, is a hard novel to summarize; the spoilers begin in the second chapter. But it's not giving much away to say that this is an Arthurian novel, set in the time of Ambrosius Aurelianus. In this novel, Ambrosius is the Prince of Britain, while the boy we know as Arthur is growing into manhood. The protagonist is Aquila, a young British-Roman officer who finds himself torn by loyalties between Rome and Britain as his childhood world is swept away.
One remarkable aspect of this young adult novel is that it covers the space of a quarter century. According to Sutcliff in "Combined Ops," we first meet Aquila when he is nineteen; by the end of the book, he is forty-three. I wish there had been more books like this in my teens: books that showed me what it is like to grow up and to change into someone new. For change, and a quest for permanence within that change, is the theme of the book. In a world in which Saxons, Jutes, Picts, the Irish, and even the Celts conspire to destroy what is left of Roman Britain, is it possible to have permanence? Is it possible to retain something from a much-beloved world that has died?
The novel explores this through the eyes of Aquila, who is character development incarnate. At the beginning of the novel, Aquila is wrenched into a harsh life. This harshness makes its way deep into his inner being, which leads eventually to some of the most poignant scenes in the novel, between Aquila and a young relative - both of them striving to show affection to each other, but both blocked by what life has done to Aquila.
Alongside Aquila's personal struggle, we witness the playing out of the Arthurian tale, set in fifth-century Britain. All of the authors today who write realistic stories about Arthurian Britain owe a great deal to Rosemary Sutcliff. She was one of the pioneers, paving their way by attempting to reconcile the fragments of surviving fact with the later Arthurian legends. She is best known for her adult Arthurian novel, "Sword at Sunset," but that book is actually a sequel to "The Lantern Bearers," which has just as strong a claim to be one of the great Arthurian novels.
"The Lantern Bearers" is also part of Rosemary Sutcliff's series about the life of a British family, ranging from Roman to Norman times. The series (variously named) begins with "The Eagle of the Ninth," the novel which inspired the movie "The Eagle."
I feel obliged to offer a caveat: One thing you will find as you read Rosemary Sutcliff's novels is that she is exceedingly fond of love-hate relationships between enemies. This is a little unsettling when it involves men of equal power, more disturbing when it involves male captors and male captives, and, from my perspective, enters into Stockholm Syndrome territory when it features male captors and their female rape victims. Sutcliff would probably say I've oversimplified the situation with a psychological label, yet I remember as a teen being frustrated by how Sutcliff's heroines seemed strong and defiant, right up to the moment when they wilted into the arms of their captors. I now realize how much Sutcliff was influenced by the romantic conventions of her time, but I don't think this is an aspect of Sutcliff's writing that has held up well over the years.
Other facets of Sutcliff's novels grate a bit, such as her relative lack of female characters and her tendency to romanticize the Roman Empire. But as far as I'm concerned, these irritants are overshadowed by the greatness of Sutcliff's prose and purpose.
Although "The Lantern Bearers" abides by the conventions of juvenile literature at the time (which leads to the entirely unheralded appearance of a baby; it might as well have been brought by a stork), this has certain advantages. A lesser author (*glances in the direction of George R. R. Martin*) might have taken the bloody violence of the original historical record and turned that into an excuse for a gore-fest. Instead, Sutcliff is carefully selective, saving violence for when it would propel character and theme forward.
Most of all, Rosemary Sutcliff is an author filled with hope, which we all need in these bleak times. Not long ago, her godson (who runs Sutcliff's literary estate) posted this quotation from "The Lantern Bearers," which is an apt climax for this review:
"It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again. Morning always grows again out of the darkness, though maybe not for the people who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind."
"The Lantern Bearers" has haunted me for nearly forty years. I discovered this historical novel during my sixteenth summer; rereading it now, I find passage after passage that inspired incidents in my own stories. The novel made its way into my very bones, shaping me as a writer and as a person.
These days, it seems that the only way in which great writers can be remembered is if someone makes a film of one of their books. In this way, a so-so 2011 movie called "The Eagle" has brought a new influx of readers to an author who assuredly should have never have been forgotten.
On purely stylistic grounds, I can think of few writers to match Rosemary Sutcliff. She is a poet who chose to write in prose. In this passage, which I have chosen entirely at random, she immerses her readers in the British landscape:
"It was full dark now, though the flat-topped clouds massing above the pass to the coast were still touched with rose-copper on their under-bellies. The air was without freshness, lying like warm silk over one's face, and the stars were veiled in faint thunder-wrack. Certainly there was a storm coming, Aquila thought, as he made his way round the curve of the hill below the inner rampart and plunged into the twisting cleft among the rocks. The thin silver plash of the water under the ferns sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness, and the faint honey scent of the blackthorn breathed up to him. Looking down as he scrambled lower, he saw the pale blur of the blossoms like foam on dark water, where the thorn trees leaned together over the little hollow in the rocks - and the pale blur of a face suddenly turned up to him."
Sutcliff's lyricism is pervasive. She is just as capable of beautiful wording when describing a cavalry charge:
"A great warning cry went up from the nearest ranks of the enemy, and snatching one glance over his shoulder, Aquila saw the flower of the British Cavalry sweeping towards them along the tawny slope. There was a swelling thunder of hooves in his ears, and the wild, high song of the hunting-horn as the great arrowhead of wild riders hurtled down upon the battle. At the shining point of the arrowhead, [the leader] swept by, his great white horse turned for a flashing moment to silver by the burst of sunlight that came scudding down the valley to meet him, the silver mane streaming over his bridle arm, and the sods flying like birds from the great round hooves. . . . Just for the one instant they were there, seen out of the corner of the eye, with the white, fierce brilliance of figures seen by lightning; then they were past, and the following Cavalry thundered after, to hurl themselves into the Cavalry of [the enemy] - into them and through them, scattering them as dead leaves scatter before a gust of wind, and on."
The concreteness of her description evokes a long-ago world, as does the care with which she crafts the characters' dialogue. (In her essay "History is People," Sutcliff spoke disparagingly of a certain modern trend in historical fiction: "Personally, I find it destroys the atmosphere when a young Norman Knight says to his Squire, 'Shut ip, Dickie, you're getting too big for your boots.'") In "Combined Ops," an essay she wrote about how she came to create "The Lantern Bearers," Sutcliff names her main historical guides as two books by Trelawney Dayrell Reed: "The Battle for Britain in the Fifth Century" and "The Rise of Wessex." I leave it to others who know more than I do about British history to say how historically accurate her novels were at the time she wrote them. All I can say is that, at the level of myth, they provided me with a framework that I continue to build upon.
"The Lantern Bearers," which won the Carnegie Medal in 1959, is a hard novel to summarize; the spoilers begin in the second chapter. But it's not giving much away to say that this is an Arthurian novel, set in the time of Ambrosius Aurelianus. In this novel, Ambrosius is the Prince of Britain, while the boy we know as Arthur is growing into manhood. The protagonist is Aquila, a young British-Roman officer who finds himself torn by loyalties between Rome and Britain as his childhood world is swept away.
One remarkable aspect of this young adult novel is that it covers the space of a quarter century. According to Sutcliff in "Combined Ops," we first meet Aquila when he is nineteen; by the end of the book, he is forty-three. I wish there had been more books like this in my teens: books that showed me what it is like to grow up and to change into someone new. For change, and a quest for permanence within that change, is the theme of the book. In a world in which Saxons, Jutes, Picts, the Irish, and even the Celts conspire to destroy what is left of Roman Britain, is it possible to have permanence? Is it possible to retain something from a much-beloved world that has died?
The novel explores this through the eyes of Aquila, who is character development incarnate. At the beginning of the novel, Aquila is wrenched into a harsh life. This harshness makes its way deep into his inner being, which leads eventually to some of the most poignant scenes in the novel, between Aquila and a young relative - both of them striving to show affection to each other, but both blocked by what life has done to Aquila.
Alongside Aquila's personal struggle, we witness the playing out of the Arthurian tale, set in fifth-century Britain. All of the authors today who write realistic stories about Arthurian Britain owe a great deal to Rosemary Sutcliff. She was one of the pioneers, paving their way by attempting to reconcile the fragments of surviving fact with the later Arthurian legends. She is best known for her adult Arthurian novel, "Sword at Sunset," but that book is actually a sequel to "The Lantern Bearers," which has just as strong a claim to be one of the great Arthurian novels.
"The Lantern Bearers" is also part of Rosemary Sutcliff's series about the life of a British family, ranging from Roman to Norman times. The series (variously named) begins with "The Eagle of the Ninth," the novel which inspired the movie "The Eagle."
I feel obliged to offer a caveat: One thing you will find as you read Rosemary Sutcliff's novels is that she is exceedingly fond of love-hate relationships between enemies. This is a little unsettling when it involves men of equal power, more disturbing when it involves male captors and male captives, and, from my perspective, enters into Stockholm Syndrome territory when it features male captors and their female rape victims. Sutcliff would probably say I've oversimplified the situation with a psychological label, yet I remember as a teen being frustrated by how Sutcliff's heroines seemed strong and defiant, right up to the moment when they wilted into the arms of their captors. I now realize how much Sutcliff was influenced by the romantic conventions of her time, but I don't think this is an aspect of Sutcliff's writing that has held up well over the years.
Other facets of Sutcliff's novels grate a bit, such as her relative lack of female characters and her tendency to romanticize the Roman Empire. But as far as I'm concerned, these irritants are overshadowed by the greatness of Sutcliff's prose and purpose.
Although "The Lantern Bearers" abides by the conventions of juvenile literature at the time (which leads to the entirely unheralded appearance of a baby; it might as well have been brought by a stork), this has certain advantages. A lesser author (*glances in the direction of George R. R. Martin*) might have taken the bloody violence of the original historical record and turned that into an excuse for a gore-fest. Instead, Sutcliff is carefully selective, saving violence for when it would propel character and theme forward.
Most of all, Rosemary Sutcliff is an author filled with hope, which we all need in these bleak times. Not long ago, her godson (who runs Sutcliff's literary estate) posted this quotation from "The Lantern Bearers," which is an apt climax for this review:
"It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again. Morning always grows again out of the darkness, though maybe not for the people who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind."
no subject
Date: 2018-12-10 12:39 am (UTC)I think "The Lantern Bearers" was the first novel I read by Sutcliff, when I was about sixteen. I've been reading and rereading her books ever since then, seeing them anew each time.
Rereading "The Lantern Bearers" and "Sword at Sunset" this time, I was disturbed by the sameness of the female characters' wilt-for-the-man. It began to feel like a trope that Sutcliff loved. I have no problem with tropes per se; I'm perfectly fine with reading Sutcliff's master-and-slave-become-friends trope (though that trope has some pitfalls also). It's just that the female characters didn't seem to me to have much role in the stories except to play out their trope and provide the male protagonists with an opportunity for angst. It felt very much as though Sutcliff had borrowed a male-gaze fashion of writing about women.
Guenhamara struck me as the best-rounded female character, which made it all the more frustrating that she wasn't allowed to do anything in "Sword at Sunset" except be the object of love. I mean, she is a royal personage, for heaven's sakes. Surely she has some sort of royal duties.