The Grail Quest (3) – HereticMay 30, 2004
The Grail Quest (3) – Heretic , by Bernard Cornwell (HarperCollins, 2004). Thanks to the BBC televison series starring Sean Bean, the world knows Bernard Cornwell best as the author of the Sharpe books, the series of smashing historical adventures chronicling the life and times of Richard Sharpe, a rough and tumble British rifleman who rises to high rank in Wellington’s army during the Napoleonic Wars. Sharpe’s great, mind you, but Cornwell has worked some other periods as well. His Arthurian series was damned good, and so is “The Grail Quest,” his latest, a medieval trilogy about Thomas of Hookton, who’s sort of Sharpe with a longbow. Thomas is a bastard bowman fighting at Crecy in the Hundred Years War, looking for loot, women, and the Holy Grail, and trying to revenge himself on the man who killed his father. Though HERETIC concludes the “grail” arc that began in HARLEQUIN and VAGABOND, I hope that Cornwell gives us more books about Thomas and his descendents. Lots of battles yet to fight in the Hundred Years War, after all… |