Book Review: A King's Ransom
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By Sharon Kay Penman
Putnam, 2014
It’s fair to say that Sharon Kay Penman’s 1982 novel The Sunne in Splendour jump-started the modern renaissance of historical fiction, and even now, in 2014’s A King’s Ransom, over thirty years later, it’s easy to see why. That earlier novel was about King Richard III; this latest novel is about his famous namesake, Richard I, the Lionheart, the eldest surviving son of King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Richard I was a renowned warrior-king, famous for embarking on the bloodthirsty Third Crusade and for being captured on his way home and held for the proverbial king’s ransom by the Duke of Austria for years. A King’s Ransom acts as a sequel to 2011’s intensely enjoyable Lionheart, but it can be read independently and is in every way a stronger novel, in fact the strongest novel Penman has yet written. Her subject here is the complicated dramatic terrain of Richard’s post-Crusade years: captivity, ransom, scrabbling war, a largely thwarted kingship spent mostly far away from England. And her Richard is the most complex and multi-layered character she’s ever created. The outline of his nature is roughly well-known:
He was thirty-five and for nigh on twenty years, he’d been a soldier. By now Death was an old and familiar foe. He could not begin to count all the times he’d put his life at risk. Storms at sea, malarial fevers, sword thrusts that he’d parried just in time, lances that shattered against his shield, crossbow bolts and arrows that seared through the air with a lethal humming sound he sometimes heard in his dreams. Men said he was blessed in battle, but his body bored the scars of old wounds like any other man’s. His nephew Henri had once told him, half admiringly and half in reproach, that he was easy to find on the battlefields of the Holy Land, for he was always in the thick of the fighting, usually surrounded by a sea of saffron, the colors of Saladin’s elite Mamluk guard. He’d not denied it, for he believed a king must lead by example, and he’d been the first to force his way into Messina, first to land upon the beach at Cyprus, and again at Jaffa. He’d long known that he did not feel the crippling fear that other men did in combat, had accepted it without question as God’s gift, proof of divine favor.
But this Richard is much more – and much less - than the simple warrior-king so beloved of song and story. He’s a sardonic figure, weathered by his experiences, gruff but also tender, and something of a mystery even to his own followers, including his cousin Morgan and his closest lieutenants, who have the same foremost question about him that historians and admirers have had ever since: “Do you never fear for your own safety?”:
Richard was quiet for a moment, considering whether that was a question he wanted to answer. He suspected it was one many a man had long wanted to ask, although the only person who’d ever dared had been his wife. It was easier just to brush the query aside. But he liked his Welsh cousin and knew that Morgan’s concern was genuine. “Well,” he said at last, “when a man’s blood is running hot and his heart is racing, it can be difficult to tell excitement from fear.”There was a silence and then Baldwin said, very dryly, “Passing strange, for I have no trouble telling them apart.”Richard laughed, handing his gambeson to one of his squires, and then made one final effort to explain what seemed to him quite obvious. “It is simple, really. In a storm, we are utterly helpless, at the mercy of the wind and waves. But on the battlefield, my fate is in my hands. What happens is up to me.”
This fundamental need for his own agency hovers over the first half of A King’s Ransom, obviously, because Richard soon learns what most of Penman’s readers will known setting out: that his flight across the Continent makes it almost inevitable that he’ll be captured, first by some minor prince, then to be handed up the chain of command from the Holy Roman Emperor to the King of France, each one hating Richard just a bit more than the one before.
It’s a potentially very tricky situation, but as any novelist will tell you, it’s also one nearly devoid of effective drama, since the main character spends most of the time in jail and under close observation. Penman sees immediately that the solution to this problem lies in the wide supporting cast of great characters in the Richard story, from his strong-willed sister Joanna to his fiery wife Berengaria to, most of all, his force of nature mother, the aging Eleanor, who steals every scene of A King’s Ransom she’s in, flashing the merciless steel by which fans of “The Lion in Winter” will know her:
She must somehow put from her mind those images of her son shackled and feverish and defenseless, must not think of the even greater horrors that might await him in a French dungeon. She would gain his freedom, and then she would help him take his vengeance upon the unworthy, cowardly men who’d dared to imprison a king. “I swear it, Richard,” she said softly, “I swear it upon the life of your wretched, faithless brother.”
Penman has always been a stickler for research, and she’s a wiser novelist with every book. She knows as well as her readers do that it’s impossible for these late novels of hers, centering on violent religious wars in the Holy Land, to avoid contemporary resonances, and she’s pleasingly wry in deploying those resonances, as when it’s a Christian cardinal, not a Saracen fanatic, who proffers the affronted doctrinal justification for all this bloodshed in the name of Jesus:
“Scriptures speak quite clearly, leaving no room from misunderstanding, telling us that By sword and famine shall those false prophets be consumed. What you suggest, my lord count, is not only blasphemous, but it would lead to ruination and damnation. A land where Christians must live side by side with heretics and infidels would be truly accursed.”
A King’s Ransom is a big novel – over 600 pages – about a figure who struck people as larger-than-life even in his own day. It’s sumptuously fluid reading throughout, a fantastic historical novel from the doyenne of the form.