Thursday, February 12, 2015

Review: "The Price of Blood," Patricia Bracewell

Historical fiction review of The Price of Blood by Patricia Bracewell

By Paul Carrier

If you have a sketchy grasp of English history, as many of us do, you may believe there’s a lengthy void, a black hole, between the end of the Roman occupation of England in the early 5th century and the Norman conquest in 1066.

For hundreds of years, supposedly, nothing memorable happened. The Anglo-Saxons took control, and that was that.

Except, of course, that there never has been a 600-year lull in history-making human activity. In England’s case, for example, the kingdom was in turmoil by the early 11th century, which is the setting for Patricia Bracewell’s The Price of Blood. It is the second novel in a trilogy based on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

King Æthelred (c. 968-1015) is ruthless and egomaniacal. Paranoid and ineffective, he barely tolerates his young Norman wife, Queen Emma; fears the spirit of his murdered brother; distrusts his grown sons from a previous marriage; and enrages his northern lords by murdering Ælfhelm, their most powerful and respected nobleman.

Æthelred is, as one character muses, “a wicker king, an empty thing of sticks and straw.” The Scots despise him. Much of his realm is inhabited by Danish settlers who live by Danish law. Viking raiders pillage his lands and slaughter his people with brazen impunity. And the vengeful Elgiva, the late Ælfhelm’s ambitious and cunning daughter, plots a Danish conquest of England.

But the central character here is not Æthelred. It’s Emma, whose infant son Edward is heir to the English throne. Like her brooding, nightmare-plagued husband (known to history as Æthelred the Unready), Emma (c. 985-1052) was a real-life figure.

The historical record has little to say about Emma of Normandy, but Bracewell combines research, conjecture and imagination to create a shrewd, independent-minded queen who may deserve a higher profile in the annals of English history. Emma is determined to protect her son and assure his coronation, even as Æthelred's grasp on his kingdom weakens and Emma’s enemies plan her demise.

Torn by divided loyalties, Emma continues to stand by her husband, yet her heart belongs to his eldest son, Athelstan. Like Emma, Athelstan is unwilling to break with the king. But Athelstan and Emma have little confidence in Æthelred’s judgment, leadership or courage, and their dissatisfaction grows with time.

Do the Danes and Elgiva, who has secretly married the son of the Danish king, pose the greatest threat to Æthelred’s reign? Or is Athelstan a more potent menace? And what of the evil Eadric, the king’s closest adviser, whose megalomania is obvious to everyone but the king? As the scheming players jockey for power, will Emma succeed in protecting her son until he can ascend to the throne?

Bracewell has a fascinating tale to tell. She has cooked up a sizzling plot whose high drama and verve make The Price of Blood a real page-turner graced with a stunning conclusion in which a queen’s remarkable secret plays a central role. The Price of Blood whisks readers to a world whose complex and believable characters are all the more intriguing because the setting is so alien to us.

Some may find the proliferation of foreign-sounding, often similar, Anglo-Saxon names confusing. In addition to King Æthelred, we encounter Ælfgifu, Ælfheah, Ælfhun, Ælfhelm and Ælfric, Wulfnoth and Wulfstan, Uhtred and Ulfkytel. But Bracewell has included a thorough who’s who that identifies which characters are fictional (very few, it turns out), as well as a glossary of unfamiliar terms and maps of England and London.

I haven't read Shadow on the Crown, the first book in this series, but I didn’t feel as though that placed me at a disadvantage. The Price of Blood stands up well on its own, although there’s no mistaking that it is the middle book in a trilogy. As bad as things were for Emma and for England between 1006 and 1012, the period covered in The Price of Blood, “things will get even worse” in the sequel, Bracewell writes in an author’s note.