...but I wasn't able to get far in this book. I came to it with high expectations, for I've enjoyed Mr. Cornwell's hard-bitten sailing adventures and his Richard Sharpe series, and thought he might make a go of it with Stonehenge. I am intrigued why and how Megalithic monuments were built, and archaeology can only provide nameless clues. However, after a few chapters I could no longer take the primitive dialogue and unlikable characters.
After reading a number of other equally unsatisfying pre-historical novels, I think the problem may not be mine, but is the general difficulty, for any author no matter how skilled, of writing a good story out of whole cloth, with no written, personalized, historical framework. After all, we can assign not a single person's name to Stonehenge; there are no chronicles from this pre-literate time. Thus there's nothing to force a real structure into a narrative, to present known conflicts of interest. We have no set of expectations for an author to work against, or surprise us by. This situation is quite different from writing truly historical novels set in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, or, potentially, China (see the Judge Dee series) and now the Maya. Instead, for a Neolithic or Paleolithic story, an author has to be fabulously creative, constructing a whole intricate world of social and economic relations as well as engrossing characters, from almost sheer imagination. Maybe it will take someone with talents in creating science fiction or fantasy worlds to do it right, or perhaps a collaboration. (Or I may, unfortunately, simply not know who has done it already?) I still have this book, in hopes I gave up too early and I'll give it another go someday.
... but I wasn't able to get far in this book. I came to it with high expectations, for I've enjoyed Mr. Cornwell's hard-bitten sailing adventures and his Richard Sharpe series, and thought he might make a go of it with Stonehenge. I am intrigued why and how Megalithic monuments were built, and archaeology can only provide nameless clues. However, after a few chapters I could no longer take the primitive dialogue and unlikable characters. After reading a number of other equally unsatisfying pre-historical novels, I think the problem may not be mine, but is the general difficulty, for any author no matter how skilled, of writing a good story out of whole cloth, with no written, personalized, historical framework. After all, we can assign not a single person's name to Stonehenge; there are no chronicles from this pre-literate time. Thus there's nothing to force a real structure into a narrative, to present known conflicts of interest. We have no set of expectations for an author to work against, or surprise us by. This situation is quite different from writing truly historical novels set in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, or, potentially, China (see the Judge Dee series) and now the Maya. Instead, for a Neolithic or Paleolithic story, an author has to be fabulously creative, constructing a whole intricate world of social and economic relations as well as engrossing characters, from almost sheer imagination. Maybe it will take someone with talents in creating science fiction or fantasy worlds to do it right, or perhaps a collaboration. (Or I may, unfortunately, simply not know who has done it already? ) I still have this book, in hopes I gave up too early and I'll give it another go someday.