Just this moment finished Frontier Wolf by Rosemary Sutcliff -- in fact the first of her novels that I have ever read, surprisingly, since I have long admired her memoir Blue Remembered Hills after reading it straight off the cataloging cart in 1983. Frontier Wolf is part of her series loosely following members of the Aquila family in Roman Britain, this one to do with the young and disgraced Alexios Flavius Aquila sent to command a band of half-wild frontier scouts north of Hadrian's Wall in 343 A.D.
Sutcliff's prose is extremely readable, very evocative at times in her descriptions of the countryside even in its wintry glumness -- oh, Britain in January! -- yet spare and unstinting when dealing with the realities of life in that brutal time and place. She is noticeably more "modern" than Ellis Peters but in the same vein; I didn't care much for her use of sentence fragments, but this is a minor cavil. I was quite caught up with the story, and read the whole novel in two days, and I am actually not a little disappointed that there does not seem to be another book with this character, who I found very interesting in the way that he dealt with his mistakes and dilemmas.
The cover of this edition, too is an excellent fit to the story -- dark, brooding, enigmatic.
I've also just finished Miss Pym Disposes, the first of my re-read of those Josephine Tey books that I own, and am a few chapters into The Franchise Affair. I have long admired Tey, and was surprised to realize not long ago that
it must be twenty years since I have read any of her books. I remember the three novels in the first omnibus pretty well, I think -- Miss Pym, Franchise, and Brat Farrar --and of course her most famous, The Daughter of Time, but not the others -- A Shilling for Candles and The Singing Sands -- so I am looking forward to the re-read.
I do have to say here, though, that this time around I am finding Tey's repeated insistence on the infallibility of facial features as indications of character to be more than a little irritating and at times quite unsettling. It has more than a whiff of phrenology about it at times. And anyone who has seen "A Class Divided" can't, I think, help seeing the injustice in the assertion that people with a certain shade of blue eyes are all liars. To be sure, Tey does qualify her insistence at least once, in this exchange from The Franchise Affair, here replying to the statement that people who have one eye larger than the other are invariably murderers: "'And when you turn up a photograph of the revered vicar of Nether Dumbleton who is being given a presentation by his grateful parishioners to mark his fiftieth year of devoted service, and you note that the setting of his eyes is wildly unequal, what conclusion do you come to?' 'That his wife satisfies him, his children obey him, his stipend is sufficient for his needs, he has no politics, he gets on with the local big-wigs, and he is allowed to have the kind of services he wants. In fact, he has never had the slightest need to murder anyone.' 'It seems to me that you are having your cake and eating it very nicely.'"
I have to say that I didn't quite buy Tey's verdict that Richard III did not murder the Princes in the Tower, mostly because the portrait on which she bases her whole premise, apparently this one,
has always given me the creeps. Personally, I think it risky to base character analysis at this level on a painting, when so much depends on the talent of the portrait painter.
The fact that the above portrait from the National Gallery is a late-16th-century copy of an early-16th-century painting, viz this one,
which is in turn apparently a retouched copy of a now-lost contemporary (15th-century) portrait, makes its likeness to the original even more suspect, like a great game of visual Telephone.
But never mind, we were talking about books -- Tey is a delight to read, so much that the fact that I take exception to some of her arguments feels more like friendly banter than a serious disagreement. Her characters feel true-to-life, even to their pet theories and the vigor with which they defend them, her stories move along at a cracking pace, and her intelligence and wit shine through on every page.
