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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 03:47 pm (UTC)