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malabar · Posted: Sat Mar 25, 2006 3:08 pm Post subject: 70. A Hollow Crown, Helen Hollick

This book is set in Saxon England (early 11th century), focusing on Emma of Normandy. She was married first to Aethelred (the Unready) and then Canute, giving birth to Edward the Confessor among others. Since I'm a big fan of Eleanor of Aquitaine, I hoped for another ass-kicking medieval babe-o-logue. I love big fat historical novels for the most part, and I really wanted to like this one. Unfortunately, it was difficult for several reasons, all of them stylistic:

1) This author seems either unacquainted with or unwilling to use semicolons. The run-on sentences and comma splices are legion.

2) Either she or her editor has a bad habit of substituting words: "opaque" for "transparent" and "prevaricate" for "equivocate", among others. It drives me batty. (OK, at least prevaricate and equivocate are close - opaque vs. transparent is unforgivable.)

3) She uses sentence fragments excessively. So that they jar. So that the flow of the story is interrupted. Like this.

4) *geek alert* While the author is willing to use dialect in Anglo-Saxon where appropriate, she uses modern French for the Normans. This wouldn't be so annoying except that there are loads of sources for the Norman dialect used at the time, the principal one being the Song of Roland, which I found online in about 10 minutes of searching. If she was going to use the dialects, she should have taken the trouble to use both the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman French, dammit. Or she could have just used modern English and sidestepped the issue. Maybe she's an Anglo-Saxon scholar who didn't think it worth her while to try with the French - or maybe she's just British and didn't think the Normans counted.

5) Having Canute spelled "Cnut" was - well - distracting, to say the least. Orthographically correct, maybe, but I would have found it much easier to deal with if she had gone with an initial K.

That said, I did manage to finish the book, so it's pretty page-turning aside from all that. At the very least I hoped for the Norman Invasion so that the characters would no longer be stuck with names like Aelfgifu and Alfthyrth. But no, the story ends in 1042 with the accession of Edward the Confessor. Sigh. They just don't make medieval babe-o-logues like they used to.

jeffp

malabar · Posted: Sun Mar 26, 2006 7:42 am Post subject:

I love the icon! Thanks!

jeffp · Posted: Sun Mar 26, 2006 10:53 am Post subject:

All thanks go to Doug, from whom all BBBB (Bulletin Board Based Blessings) flow.

--jeffp