Stonehenge

Author: Bernard Cornwell
Genre: Historical
Rating: A

In my opinion it almost seems as though the further back in time Bernard Cornwell goes, the better his stories get.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the Sharpe and Starbuck books as much as the next Cornwell fan, but it seems like his best work is set in periods of time where there is little to know actual historical records; his three best works are, in my opinion, the Saxon Stories (set twelve hundred years ago), the Warlord Chronicles (set in Arthurian Britain), and Stonehenge (set some four thousand years ago).  Of the currently ten novels set out by these three designations, my favourite individual novel is probably Stonehenge, although in providing the complete story instead of being a part of a greater work it has an advantage over the other novels.

Stonehenge is a how it could have happened type novel, where Cornwell looks at Stonehenge and attempts to tell a story around how it came to be.  Set primarily in the settlement of Ratharryn, the story follows three half-brothers, Lengar, Camaban, and Saban, the sons and eventual heirs of the tribe’s chief, Hengall.  Lengar is the eldest and the fiercest; he is a warrior and dreams of one day leading his tribe to greatness, in opposition to his father’s more cautious nature.  Camaban is the middle child and the crippled; at the start of the novel he suffers from both a clubbed foot and a pronounced stutter and has been living for a number of years in exile from the tribe.  Where his brother dreams of greatness through war, Camaban dreams of greatness through the gods, notably the sun god, who the tribe calls Saul.  Saban is the youngest of the trio, and their father’s favourite.  At the start of the novel he is not yet a man, but through the course of the novel he proves himself to be more of a man than his brothers.  One day an outsider rides into the tribes’ Old Temple, where he is killed by Lengar who finds a hoard of gold on him.  Lengar dreams of using this gold to buy warriors, while his father insists that it will be buried under his hut, with the rest of the tribes’ treasures, although he does use some of it to build a new temple, the Sky Temple, at the site of the Old Temple.  This new temple is only the beginning, as a course of events change the tribe of Ratharryn and lead to the building of the temple that we now know as Stonehenge, although it’s never called such in the book.

The thing that I loved about this book was that I spent half of it yelling at the book and the characters within it for their behaviour.  I’m not a particularly religious person and a lot of this book is based around religious fever as the characters, fuelled by Camaban, attempt to draw the sun god closer to them so that they can end all death and suffering among mankind, as well as winter.  The book is one of Cornwell’s least factually based novels, with little real knowledge of the people and cultures that existed during the time when Stonehenge was built, but he takes what we do know and strings it together in an intriguing narrative.  Rather than taking an established world – as he does in all of his previously existing books, even to an extent the Warlord Chronicles – he contrives one out of his imagination, and does so with the same amount of detail that you would expect in any of his novels.  He even includes a typical Cornwellian historical note, a full twenty pages detailing the limited information that we do have, the places that he describes in the book, and the things that inspired him in his writings.

The thing that I like most about this novel is that while it’s primarily about the building of Stonehenge it’s also the story of Saban and the many troubles that plague his life.  From the moment that his elder brother kills the outsider and decides that he must also kill Saban in order to keep his find a secret Saban shows this degree of cunningness that helps save him through his endeavours – and helps to build the monument.  He grows as the story progresses, from a young child to a man with his own children, and I’ve always enjoyed reading works that attempt to capture a child’s prospective, even if only for awhile.  The other thing is that while Saban is the hero, he’s not overly heroic.  He’s far too cautious and prone to being trustful to really take action for much of the novel.  His plots are as elaborate as his brothers’ plots, but at the same time are of a much simpler nature – he is a simple man.  He’s an everyman, living in a prehistoric period.