SWORD SONG: The Battle for London
Bernard Cornwell
Harper
Historical Fiction
ISBN: 9780060888640

• Read an Excerpt

I spent most of yesterday driving around central New Jersey, running a number of miscellaneous errands, and I was thinking that there isn't much place for a Viking in this modern world. None of the characters who populate Bernard Cornwell's Saxon tales --- the tireless men of the shield wall, the doughty warrior-priests, the crafty boatmasters --- would be able to do what I did that day, which was walk into Lowe's to get a new mailbox and pay for it with a Visa card. Vikings are all very well off in the pages of historical fiction, but the world of today requires a different skill set.

Or so I thought. When I got home I did another un-Viking-like thing. I fired up the DVR and played the first episode of the new Ken Burns film on World War II. There was a mild-mannered gray-haired retiree explaining how he hunted Japanese soldiers on Bataan and didn't consider the day a success unless he had killed at least one. That's the appropriate Viking attitude for you, preserved down to this very day.

SWORD SONG, the fourth installment in The Saxon Chronicles, finds our hero Uhtred faced with the very modern problem of a deadline. The half-ruined Roman town of Lundene has been occupied by a new wave of Danish invaders, seeking to capitalize on the divisions in the Saxon kingdoms of Britain. From Lundene, the Vikings can control trade on the Temes River and raid deep into the kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia. Uhtred is --- however begrudgingly --- sworn to the service of Alfred, King of Wessex, and Alfred has decreed that his new son-in-law is to be the new ruler of Mercia. The Vikings must leave by the start of spring, or else.

Although Uhtred is an utterly reliable and deadly warrior, he is ill-suited for the task at hand. For one thing, his sympathies lie toward the Danes, with whom he shares a religion and a fierce fighting spirit. The Danes have promised him the kingdom of Mercia if he will join them in overthrowing Alfred in Wessex, and they've put together a ruse to convince him that the Fates themselves are on their side. Not to mention that if Uhtred is victorious against the Danes, he is assured to get none of the credit or the spoils of battle.

It would be wrong to say that SWORD SONG is a psychological novel, but it is one in which Uhtred spends a lot of time fretting --- specifically about the conflict between his oaths to Alfred and the fatalism of his philosophy. "Fate is inexorable," Uhtred reminds us --- maybe one too many times --- so how can a man bind his future conduct with an oath if fate decrees otherwise, especially if his oath binds him to a near-suicidal river-borne assault against a Viking shield wall?

And, of course, there's no way that Uhtred would back down from a challenge like that, just like there's no way that Cornwell would cheat his readers out of such a battle scene. Uhtred does take his raiders pell-mell down the Thames to capture a gate from inside, and a glorious, messy, bloody battle occurs. Just as Uhtred's place is in the shield wall of battle, Cornwell's place is in his description of armed conflict, making the chaos clear, bringing all the little details to life and helping to ensure that the Viking spirit gets carried down to the next generation.

    --- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds, who writes the "Northbound" blog at http://www.txreviews.com/blog.

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