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(More customer reviews)I don't read a lot of viking books these days. Not because I don't like the genre or the era or the ethos though, but because I find so few that do justice to the time and place they aim to depict. More, I'm partial to the literary approach that aims to recapture and evoke the saga tradition in which the original viking stories came down to us (suggesting the voice and tone of the old Icelandic sagas) and that is a rarity in most modern saga novels (though it can still be found, in varying degrees in such viking classics as Eric Brighteyes and Styrbiorn the Strong and, of course, in the Golden Warrior -- or, for an even more recent and solidly successful effort in this direction, Saga: A Novel Of Medieval Iceland).
Nevertheless I recently found myself reading THE WHALE ROAD and was pleasantly surprised to find it tightly paced and rich in its accurate evocation of the viking world (as it might really have been), despite its fairly modern style and voice. The author is apparently an enthusiastic viking reenactor and has spent a deal of time in this milieu, giving a real freshness and sense of reality to the details of the life he describes. Robert Low has vividly recreated a not-so-loveable gang of Norse seafaring mercenaries, and how life might have been for these rogues and cutthroats on the whale road, in this the first of his Oathsworn trilogy.
Though the story is somewhat singleminded in its focus on these hard men and their often violent fellowship, built mainly around thieving and killing (of both enemies and victims), and though it never digs too deeply into a wide range of human motivations beyond the relatively uncomplicated ones of greed, honor and lust, it is well paced, with a bit of mystery tossed in as the Oathsworn crew sets out to find a fabled treasure hidden in eastern lands (think The Nibelungenlied: Prose Translation (Penguin Classics) or Volsunga Saga: The Story of the Volsungs and the Nibelungs).
Following the historical record (and Low has done his research admirably) Einar the Black, leader of these blackguards, takes his bloodthirsty crew into the lands that would one day become Russia, after retrieving Orm the son of one of his critical supporters, to uncover a mythic treasure hoard and a sword of allegedly mystical powers.
Though I'm always alert for historical inaccuracies (having researched and written an historical novel about the Norse myself some years back), I was pleasantly surprised to find this a near perfect rendering of what we currently know about the peoples and ways of life in this era and place in history. The portrayal of the still coalescing Swedish and Russian worlds, especially, seemed right both on the details and the overall feel of it. This isn't quite the sort of novel I'm drawn to because I prefer a broader and deeper exploration of character but it's fast-paced, vivid and remarkably entertaining. Though the characters aren't deep they're sharply drawn, testimony to Low's apparent use of real people he has known in his reenactment group as models for the warriors in this novel.
I actually came to this one in an odd fashion, having stumbled across an interview with the author on-line in which he told his interlocutor that he was reading but not enjoying the novel of the Norse I'd written! Stung, I whipped off a brief e-mail to him, to let him know I'd read that and regretted his reaction to my own viking novel. (I guess I wanted him to feel a little guilty though that probably wasn't fair of me -- I should have left it alone!)
To my surprise, he responded, taking me to task for having previously denigrated his novel (this one) in an amazon discussion group. I was surprised because I hadn't read this book and didn't think I would have panned it unread. After we went back and forth a few times, it turned out I had actually been responding to someone's recommendation to read it with a dismissive remark that its modern (non-saga like) voice held no appeal to me! But the guilty feeling was now mine and it seemed like the only right thing left to do was to get hold of THE WHALE ROAD and give it the read I had refused to do previously.
It would have been awful if I hadn't liked it, of course (probably wouldn't have posted anything here in that case!), but, in fact, I found I did. So much so, in fact, that I actually read it in a single day. It's still not my ideal kind of book but then few books are -- for any of us. But this one is well written, fast-paced, adventurous, historically accurate and, generally, a fun read. That's a pretty strong recommendation for any writer and any book.
SWM
author of The King of Vinland's Saga
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