Kingdom of Shadows, by Barbara Erskine. Book review

First published 1988. Edition reviewed, Harper 2009, ISBN 978-0-00-728866-3. 715 pages

Kingdom of Shadows is a time-slip novel set in Scotland and England with two intertwined plots, one set in about 1290 to 1314, one set in the 1980s. The historical plot centres on Robert Bruce and Isobel MacDuff, Countess of Buchan, with other historical figures including Isobel’s husband the Earl of Buchan and Robert’s queen Elizabeth de Burgh featuring as secondary characters.  All the characters in the modern plot are fictional.

In 1980s Britain, Clare Royland inherits Duncairn Castle, a (fictional) romantic ruin on the north-east coast of Scotland, from her beloved aunt Margaret Gordon. The castle has been in the Gordon family for over seven hundred years and Clare, like her aunt, feels a powerful connection to Duncairn and to its earlier owner, Isobel Countess of Buchan, a family ancestor who played a tragic role in the Scottish Wars of Independence. But Clare’s husband Paul, a ruthless and distinctly dodgy financier in the City of London, sees Duncairn first as a nuisance and then, when an American oil company bids to buy the land, as a potential solution to his secret financial problems.  When Clare refuses the American oil company’s offer, Paul tries to make her sell Duncairn, by persuasion, fraud and force.  Meanwhile, Neil Forbes, a Scottish environmental campaigner, is organising a campaign to oppose both the sale of Duncairn and drilling for oil.  He and Clare are on the same side, but for different reasons, and Neil initially regards Clare as an enemy.  As the pressure on her builds, Clare experiences increasingly vivid visions of Isobel’s life, as though Isobel can somehow call to her from the distant past.  Is Isobel’s tragedy about to repeat itself through Clare?

I first read Kingdom of Shadows years ago.  I was reminded of it more recently when I read The Lion Wakes, because both novels feature Isobel MacDuff, Countess of Buchan, as a major character and involve a (probably fictional*) love affair between her and Robert Bruce, though that’s about the only similarity between them.  Kingdom of Shadows is a full-blown (and, at over 700 pages, ‘full’ is the operative word) Gothic romance, packed with menace, drama, passionate love and equally passionate hatred, with vaguely supernatural forces looming in the background.  The first time I read it, I remember finding the supernatural aspects irritating, so much so that I ended up skimming through quite a lot of the novel.  This time I treated it as a fantasy novel creating a world of its own that happens to have some similarities with late twentieth-century and early fourteenth-century Britain, and that worked much better for me. 

Isobel (Isabel, Isabella) MacDuff’s story, what little of it is recorded in history, is itself the stuff of tragic romance.  She was a member of the MacDuff family of Fife, who had the hereditary right to crown Scottish monarchs.  Although her husband John Comyn, Earl of Buchan, was a senior member of the Comyn family, enemies and political rivals of the Bruce family, Isobel crowned Robert Bruce when he seized the Scottish throne in 1306.  This conferred some traditional legitimacy on Robert’s rather hurried coronation, which may lie behind the harshness of the punishment later inflicted on Isobel by Edward I of England.  (I’m trying to avoid too many spoilers for readers who are not familiar with the history, so I won’t spell out what happened to her here; anyone who wants to find out can look it up on Wikipedia).  

The modern plot in Kingdom of Shadows has to go into overdrive to live up to the dramatic events of Isobel’s true story.  It reminded me of a rather over-the-top Eighties TV drama series, with its ostentatious wealth, corporate double-dealing, insider trading, fraud, blackmail, family secrets, deceit, abduction, suicide and attempted murder.  I gave up trying to keep track of all the double-crossing and fraud, and also got rather lost among Paul Royland’s collection of rich and mostly rather unappealing relatives and City colleagues.  If the financial wheeler-dealing background to Clare’s tale is intended as a sort of modern analogy to the turbulent power politics in fourteenth-century Scotland that form the background to Isobel’s tale, it has the appropriate level of dizzying complexity.

On this re-read, I was struck by the degree of allegory between Clare’s storyline and Isobel’s.  Not just in the broad parallels between the situations of the two women – controlling husbands, a love triangle, the need to make a stand – but also in details.  Sometimes the effect is quite powerful, as in their shared experience of imprisonment.  At other times I found the allegory a bit heavy-handed for my taste.  For example, both women are subjected to religious rituals by clerical brothers-in-law; and in the historical plot Robert Bruce has an Irish wife, Elizabeth de Burgh daughter of the Earl of Ulster, so the romantic hero of the modern plot, environmentalist Neil Forbes, is duly given an Irish girlfriend. I wonder if Clare’s passivity, which was another feature that irritated me first time round, was also there in the interests of creating parallels between her situation and Isobel’s. Isobel lived in a time when women, even wealthy high-born women, had very few rights. Clare has lived a very sheltered life, a beautiful rich girl who married straight from school, has always been dependent either on her parents or her husband and has never had to take her own decisions, and so she is easily pushed around by other people. Similarly, the unpleasant portrayal of Isobel’s husband may owe more to allegory with Clare’s abusive husband in the modern storyline than to the historical John Comyn.  The historical Isobel clearly disagreed politically with her husband on at least the matter of Robert Bruce’s coronation, but as far as I know nothing is known of their personal relationship except that the marriage had no surviving children, which could be interpreted in many different ways.  

The writing style is heavy on detail – I didn’t feel I really needed a description of Clare’s outfit almost every time she makes an appearance – and some of the descriptions of Clare’s nightmares and visions of Isobel border on the repetitive. The pace picks up in the last 200 pages or so as the various sub-plots involving Clare’s friends and relatives either fall by the wayside or converge on the main plot.  Atmosphere and landscape are conveyed well, especially at Duncairn with its mystical connection to both women.

A useful map at the front of the book shows the major locations in the tale, including the fictional Duncairn, and a very brief Historical Note outlines Isobel’s known history.

Gothic time-slip romance based on the tragic history of Isobel MacDuff, Countess of Buchan, during the Scottish Wars of Independence, interwoven with and paralleled by a tale about her fictional descendant Clare Royland in 1980s Britain.

*’Probably’ fictional because although there were allegations of an affair between Isobel and Robert Bruce in hostile contemporary chronicles, these may have been no more than inventions by political enemies.

The Lion Wakes, by Robert Low. Book review

Harper 2011, ISBN 978-0-00-733788-0. 439 pages

Set in southern Scotland in 1296-1298, The Lion Wakes covers the early years of the struggle that became known as the Wars of Independence.  The historical figures Robert Bruce, William Wallace, and Isabel MacDuff, Countess of Buchan are major characters, and other historical figures including King Edward I of England, Bishop Wishart of Glasgow, James Douglas, the ‘Red Comyn’ Lord of Badenoch and his cousin the Earl of Buchan appear as secondary characters. The main characters, Sir Henry (Hal) Sientcler of Herdmanston and the members of his household, are fictional.

In 1297, King Edward I of England has invaded Scotland, sacked the town of Berwick and massacred its inhabitants, declared himself Lord Paramount of Scotland, got most of the Scots nobles to swear fealty to him (with varying degrees of willingness or coercion) and gone back south to England taking the Scots royal regalia (including the Stone of Scone) with him.  A few Scots lords, including Sir William Douglas, have rebelled against Edward’s rule, and Hal Sientcler of Herdmanston has come to Douglas Castle to help defend it if necessary.  As it happens, Douglas Castle has yielded fairly amicably to Robert Bruce, the young Earl of Carrick sent to reclaim it on Edward’s instructions, with no need for fighting.  But Hal soon finds himself embroiled in the deadly rivalry between the Bruce family and the rival Comyn family, a rivalry that extends beyond politics to encompass murder, deception and a secret that holds the key to the kingdom.  Hal’s position is further complicated when he falls in love with Isabel MacDuff, unhappily married to the Bruce’s arch-rival the Earl of Buchan – and in the background, the charismatic guerrilla leader William Wallace is raising a rebellion against Edward’s officials that will set Scotland ablaze…

Braveheart aside, the struggle that became known as the Wars of Independence was at least as much a Scots civil war as a nationalistic fight between the Scots and the English, at least in the beginning.  Indeed, the idea of a ‘nation’ in anything like the modern sense was only just starting to take shape, and identities and loyalties were defined at least as much by region and kinship.  When King Alexander III fell over a Fife cliff to his death in 1286, his only direct heir was his daughter’s daughter Margaret in Norway, a little girl of three, and when she died soon after, that left three families, the Bruces, Comyns and Balliols, each with a roughly equally tenuous claim to the crown.  The Scots asked King Edward I of England to adjudicate, which was their mistake, Edward thought he saw an easy way to get himself recognised as supreme overlord in Scotland, which was his, and the Bruce, Comyn and Balliol factions thought they could use Edward as an ally and proxy in their own quarrels, which was theirs.  The ensuing two decades of increasingly vicious fighting ended up imposing on both realms an incalculable cost in money, deaths, destruction and human misery – and a saga-legacy of courage, cruelty, treachery, daring, atrocities, epic battles, heroes and villains (very often the same people) that has caught the imagination ever since.

The Lion Wakes does an excellent job of representing the background to the wars without getting bogged down in the dizzying complexities of Scots dynastic politics.  Hal Sientcler, the central character, is a minor lord from Lothian who does not have much time for any of the great lords and their squabbles, and who ends up (more or less) in the Bruce camp and fighting alongside Wallace at Stirling Bridge and Falkirk through family loyalties, accident and circumstance.  There are Scots on both sides, and much of the ‘English’ army is made up of Germans, Gascons and Welsh.

Two key battles of the Wars of Independence, Stirling Bridge (a victory for William Wallace) and Falkirk (a defeat for William Wallace), feature in The Lion Wakes, so there is no shortage of gripping battle scenes.  The description of a schiltron (formation of spearmen) limping towards safety while under attack from archery and heavy cavalry and leaving a trail of dead and maimed in its wake ‘like a dying slug’ is particularly memorable.  So is the description of a relatively minor duel between Robert Bruce and a Gascon commander – complete with lots of hints foreshadowing the famous story about Bruce’s duel with the Norman knight Bohun on the eve of the later Battle of Bannockburn.  The mystery element of the plot made me cringe at first when I realised it involved Templars, masons, secret codes and Roslin (better known now as Rosslyn) Chapel, so I was relieved when it developed into something that seemed to fit reasonably well into the historical context.

What I liked most about the book, as with the author’s previous Oathsworn series, was the characterisation.  Not just of the main players like Bruce – here a plausibly complex and interesting character, part sulky playboy, part ruthless schemer, part statesman in the making – but also of the ‘commonality’, the ordinary people who made up most of the population and most of the army.  Hal’s retainers Sim Craw and Bangtail Hob represent the tough mounted infantry of the Borders, part soldiers and part cattle rustlers (later romanticised as the Border Reivers), while the Dog Boy, Alehouse Maggie and Bet the Bread represent the working people who kept farmstead and fortress functioning.  On the other side, Addaf the Welsh mercenary gives the perspective of the archers who employed the longbow with such devastating effect at Falkirk and began the emergence of longbow archery as the war-winning weapon of the Middle Ages. 

Much of the dialogue is written with a distinctively Scots accent, and Scots words and phrases dot the narrative.  I liked this, as not only does it help to create atmosphere, it is also cleverly used to indicate social and regional differences.  Wallace speaks broader Scots than Hal, Robert Bruce at the beginning of the novel speaks English and court French but is still finding his way in Scots (reflecting his upper-class background), and Fergus the Beetle, a common soldier from north of Aberdeen, speaks such ‘braid Scots’ that the author actually provides a translation at the back of the book.  I had no difficulty following the dialect – I even understood about two-thirds of Fergus the Beetle’s speech and could deduce most of the rest from context – though it took me a little while to get a feel for it.  Readers who find the dialect troublesome may like to know that most (not all) of the Scots words are explained in a glossary at the back of the book, and may like to bookmark it for easy reference.  I also liked the use of names for Hal’s retinue – Bangtail Hob, Ill Made Jock, Tod’s Wattie, Lang Tam – these are the characteristic names of the Border, familiar from numerous criminal charge sheets over the next three centuries, and from George MacDonald Fraser’s masterly study of the Border, The Steel Bonnets, and his splendid short novel The Candlemas Road.  Like The Candlemas Road, The Lion Wakes gives a powerful impression of authenticity, a sense of having opened a door onto another world and its people, complete with their customs, norms and values.

At the end, the mystery part of the plot is fully resolved, but the Wars of Independence have hardly started, so there is clearly plenty of scope for more adventures for Hal and his companions.  I have a feeling that Bangtail Hob has a story of his own, and that the hints about Dog Boy’s parentage suggest that he is going to turn out to be a significant character in later instalments.

A helpful Author’s Note at the back sketches some of the underlying history, identifies the fictional and historical characters, and admits to some of the liberties taken with historical figures about whom little is known, notably Isabel MacDuff, Countess of Buchan.

Gripping adventure with strong characterisation and a sense of authenticity, set against the background of the Wars of Independence in late thirteenth-century Scotland.

The Sins of the Father, by Catherine Hanley. Book review.

Disclaimer: The Sins of the Father is published by Quaestor2000 who have also published my novel Paths of Exile, although I don’t think that has influenced my opinion.

Quaestor2000, 2009, ISBN 978-1-906836-11-5. 193 pages.

The Sins of the Father is set in May 1217 at Conisbrough Castle, Yorkshire, against the backdrop of the political turmoil at the end of King John’s reign. William de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, and his sister Isabelle are important secondary characters, and William Marshal (hero of The Greatest Knight) is a dominant off-stage presence. All the main characters are fictional.

Edwin Weaver, son of the bailiff at Conisbrough, is just reaching adulthood. Unpopular King John has recently died, and a faction of the English barons has proclaimed John’s nine-year-old son Henry as King, with the formidable William Marshal as Regent. This presents something of a political dilemma to the nobles who had previously rebelled against John and invited Prince Louis of France to be king. Do they support Prince Louis and risk William Marshal’s wrath, or do they change sides, join William Marshal’s campaign against Louis and risk being beaten by Louis who controls much of eastern England? William de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, has decided to switch sides and is mustering troops at his castle of Conisbrough to join the siege of Lincoln, which he hopes will convince William Marshal of his loyalty. Edwin, standing in as bailiff for his dying father, is helping to organise the logistics and never expects these great affairs of state to impinge on his own unremarkable life. But when the Earl of Sheffield, a supporter of the new young king, is murdered at Conisbrough, William de Warenne fears that he will be implicated in the crime and accused of treason unless he can find the murderer before they set out to join the Marshal. The task falls to the acting bailiff of Conisbrough, Edwin Weaver. Can the inexperienced Edwin solve the mystery and bring the murderer to justice in time?

This is a medieval murder mystery in the classic mould. A crime is committed, in a confined place with a constrained group of people, and the fictional detective (and, by extension, the reader) has to spot the clues and deduce the solution. As Edwin Weaver is clever but young and inexperienced, he has to call on help from Warenne’s squires, the military veteran in charge of the castle, the estate steward and even his dying father. This makes the investigation something of a team effort. It is also a coming-of-age story for Edwin, as he has to take decisions and responsibility and learns a great many things he would probably rather not have known about the nobility and about human nature in general.

The plot is well constructed with no obvious holes or loose ends. A neat trail of red herrings diverts the reader’s attention away from the real culprit almost until the final denouement, and when revealed the murderer and the motivation are credible for the time and for the characters involved. Some of the clues are handed to Edwin on a plate, either by his helpers or by sheer luck, but given his inexperience it would be difficult for him to solve the mystery any other way. It will be interesting to see if he has to do more of the detecting as the series develops.

As well as the mystery, The Sins of the Father paints a detailed portrait of life in early thirteenth-century England. As the bailiff’s son and stand-in, Edwin belongs to the common people but has to deal with the nobility, so he is an ideal character to show the reader all classes of society and the sharp social divisions between them. I say “class”, but “caste” might be more appropriate given the rigidity of the social divisions. Everyone’s place in society is determined by their father’s social position, with little if any scope for change and very little interaction between the classes. Edwin is horrified when he has to give orders to a noble squire who has been assigned to help him with the investigation, and a noble page is stunned to realise that a poor boy of about his own age could actually go short of food. Details such as the serving of dinner in the great hall, the upheaval caused by having to accommodate unexpected visitors of high rank, and the duties of a lord’s squire are all lovingly described.

Most of the characters are decent, likeable people, albeit with their fair share of human flaws. Only the fictional Earl of Sheffield, his brother and one of their squires are thoroughly unpleasant, three weasels who deserve each other. Edwin in particular is thoughtful and reflective, with potential for further development in the future. There is clearly scope for a sequel (or several sequels), even though the present mystery is solved at the end of the book. A useful historical note discusses some of the history behind the novel, and sets out the liberties taken and the characters invented.

Enjoyable murder mystery in an authentic setting.