Book Review: Knight's Fee
Apr. 14th, 2013 12:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerKnight’s Fee, another Sutcliff book that I didn’t review back when I first read it, though for quite different reasons than with The Silver Branch. I liked The Silver Branch but didn’t have strong feelings about it; whereas I do have ~feelings~ about Knight’s Fee, but they are complicated.
The characters here just seem so utterly divorced from Christianity. It’s not that I require Randal et al to be deeply devout or carrying on theological discussions - they are after all lowly knights, they have a manor to oversee and enemies to stab. But Christianity impinges so rarely on their lives that it always seems surprising when suddenly something Christian pops up: like, “Wait, this isn’t an alternate history of feudalism where Christianity never happened?”
And given how hugely intertwined Christianity was with everything in medieval Europe, it just doesn’t ring very medieval.
Sutcliff dealt with Christianity better in Blood Feud, I thought. Maybe it helped that Christianity could be shunted off to specific parts of the story there.
There is one other big problem with this book, and her name is Gisela. Of Sutcliff’s many un-fleshed-out, tacked-on-at-the-end-to-make-the-book-slightly-less-homoerotic love interests, Gisela is the least successful by almost any measure. Her chapters feel like they’ve been air-lifted into Knight’s Fee from a different book, so utterly divorced do they feel from anything else in Randal’s life.
Seriously, I’m pretty sure she never meets any of the characters but Randal - not even Bevis, his B-est of FFs.
(I’m kind of surprised no one has written Randal/Bevis fic yet. I have no particular yen for it, but it seems like the obvious pairing, whereas Herluin/Randal, which has been written, didn’t even occur to me. But Herluin is a minstrel and therefore way more interesting than Bevis, so I have no complaints.)
But getting back to Gisela. We first meet her when she’s smacking the dog boy, basically as a relief for her own homesickness, and...well, that’s really the big Gisela scene. Thus the apparent happiness of the ending, when it is implied that Randal will marry her, rings extra hollow. Not only does he barely know her, but “she hits servants because she doesn’t care to control her temper” doesn’t suggest she’s good spousal material.
But who else would he marry? The only other female character of note in the book - possibly the only other female character period? - is Ancret, the Little Dark Person who is a healer and old enough to be Randal’s mother and really kind of awesome. And she disappears before the end.
Are there any Sutcliff books about the Little Dark People? How have the Little Dark People managed to survive this long, apparently more or less culturally intact if kind of scattered?
...I have a theory that they are related to Elizabeth Marie Pope’s Fairy Folk in The Perilous Gard. I have no evidence for this whatsoever except that it would be awesome.
As a whole, the misery quotient is pretty low for a Sutcliff book. A lot of people die, but that is pretty par for the course; the important Sutcliff measure of misery is not character death but how much the main character hates himself and also the whole world. (Hello, Aquila! The Lantern Bearers is still the most depressing book ever. Maybe that, if nothing else, will make you happy?)
Despite his childhood deprivations - Randal starts the book as a dog boy who basically lives in the kennels - Randal is never very big on hating himself. He is a little self-doubting, perhaps, but mostly he’s steady, brave, and absurdly loyal: a very appealing character.
The characters here just seem so utterly divorced from Christianity. It’s not that I require Randal et al to be deeply devout or carrying on theological discussions - they are after all lowly knights, they have a manor to oversee and enemies to stab. But Christianity impinges so rarely on their lives that it always seems surprising when suddenly something Christian pops up: like, “Wait, this isn’t an alternate history of feudalism where Christianity never happened?”
And given how hugely intertwined Christianity was with everything in medieval Europe, it just doesn’t ring very medieval.
Sutcliff dealt with Christianity better in Blood Feud, I thought. Maybe it helped that Christianity could be shunted off to specific parts of the story there.
There is one other big problem with this book, and her name is Gisela. Of Sutcliff’s many un-fleshed-out, tacked-on-at-the-end-to-make-the-book-slightly-less-homoerotic love interests, Gisela is the least successful by almost any measure. Her chapters feel like they’ve been air-lifted into Knight’s Fee from a different book, so utterly divorced do they feel from anything else in Randal’s life.
Seriously, I’m pretty sure she never meets any of the characters but Randal - not even Bevis, his B-est of FFs.
(I’m kind of surprised no one has written Randal/Bevis fic yet. I have no particular yen for it, but it seems like the obvious pairing, whereas Herluin/Randal, which has been written, didn’t even occur to me. But Herluin is a minstrel and therefore way more interesting than Bevis, so I have no complaints.)
But getting back to Gisela. We first meet her when she’s smacking the dog boy, basically as a relief for her own homesickness, and...well, that’s really the big Gisela scene. Thus the apparent happiness of the ending, when it is implied that Randal will marry her, rings extra hollow. Not only does he barely know her, but “she hits servants because she doesn’t care to control her temper” doesn’t suggest she’s good spousal material.
But who else would he marry? The only other female character of note in the book - possibly the only other female character period? - is Ancret, the Little Dark Person who is a healer and old enough to be Randal’s mother and really kind of awesome. And she disappears before the end.
Are there any Sutcliff books about the Little Dark People? How have the Little Dark People managed to survive this long, apparently more or less culturally intact if kind of scattered?
...I have a theory that they are related to Elizabeth Marie Pope’s Fairy Folk in The Perilous Gard. I have no evidence for this whatsoever except that it would be awesome.
As a whole, the misery quotient is pretty low for a Sutcliff book. A lot of people die, but that is pretty par for the course; the important Sutcliff measure of misery is not character death but how much the main character hates himself and also the whole world. (Hello, Aquila! The Lantern Bearers is still the most depressing book ever. Maybe that, if nothing else, will make you happy?)
Despite his childhood deprivations - Randal starts the book as a dog boy who basically lives in the kennels - Randal is never very big on hating himself. He is a little self-doubting, perhaps, but mostly he’s steady, brave, and absurdly loyal: a very appealing character.
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Little Dark People
Date: 2013-04-14 08:30 am (UTC)I think Sutcliff is deliberately intending the LDP to be read as the origins of fairy folk - ISTR that there used to be a theory floating around to the effect that British stories about fairies trace back to suspicion of a real remnant population from the Bronze Age.
The Changeling says:
"Long before the Epidii came following their white horse out of the sunrise, long before any of the Golden People, the little Dark Folk had been the lords of the land. They were the People of the Hills, the hunters and the growers of corn. They were the builders of the great circle of standing stones on the high moors But their slender weapons tipped with the dark blue flint had been no match for hard cutting bronze swords, and spears tipped with the magic grey fire-metal called Iron. And so the Epidii had driven the Dark People away into the barren moors and waste places, and made their own settlements on the good land. But still, they did not go too near the Standing Stones, even in daylight; and when anyone spoke of the Dark People they looked behind them into the shadows . . ."
The LDP are the only people that she shows practicing real magic, too - there is a story, and I can't remember the title now, where an LDP woman comes down from the hills to earn some food by doing magic tricks in a bar, and her magic trick is not just a trick, it's a real illusion, as in Earthsea. When she is mocked by drunk who says he's seen better, she uses magic to drive the drunk mad and the rest of the bar has to hold him down - during the confusion she vanishes.
Re: Little Dark People
Date: 2013-04-14 03:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 08:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 03:07 pm (UTC)Also, you mentioned there is another Gisela scene, which I had also forgotten about, oops. I had another thought about Gisela, but it seems to have flown away...if it comes back to me I will let you know.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 03:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 05:57 pm (UTC)Randal has a lot of internal misery, though several times what seems to be horrible at the time results in something good, such as being given to D'Aguillon. These events of course lead up to the mixed triumph at the end, getting his knighthood at the cost of Bevis' life. So everything is always bittersweet for him; there is always a cost, there is never an unalloyed gift.
I think Randal/Bevis is so obvious it's basically canon! I think it hasn't been written mainly because it would have to be underage, and that doesn't appeal to most readers.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 06:40 pm (UTC)Aren't they late teens by the time Bevis died, and thus of age? IDK if the underage thing is much to do with its lack of popularity, really: there are whole fandoms dedicated to high school shows, and lots of fic focus on the characters while they're still fifteen or sixteen. At any rate, people could write fluffy and not-very-explicit romance about them with a clear conscious (and Randal and Bevis would totally have a fluffy romance).
Maybe that's why no one writes it. Sutcliff fans are just not that into fluffy romance.