The Archer’s Tale

Bernard Cornwell, the author of the acclaimed The Warlord Chronicles and The Saxon Stories, is known to have a clear predilection for historical fiction since virtually all of his work belongs to this genre. The Archer’s Tale, the first book in the trilogy called Grail Quest is one more novel written in a similar style, with a plot that starts at the beginning of the Hundred Years War. However, more concerned with describing the great battles than with telling a proper story, Cornwell develops a narrative so shallow and uninteresting that the main plot gets even ignored by its own characters.

Thomas, the protagonist, is the son of a priest in the village of Hookton in England. While his father makes plans for him to become a scholar, the boy just wants to train with his longbow and hook up with new and beautiful women: the only moments in his life when he feels truly fulfilled. On a fateful day, however, Hookton is sacked by a band of French mercenaries, commanded by the mysterious and vile Harlequin, and the relic of his father’s church, the spear that St. George himself used to kill the dragon, is stolen. The archer vows to take vengeance before his father’s body and decides to join the English army, glimpsing a chance to fight against the French and find his nemesis.

In the first chapter of the book, both the protagonist and the author forget everything that happened in the prologue though. They are all so fascinated by the Hundred Years’ War that there is barely enough room for searching the mythical Spear. Thomas finds himself in the midst of sieges and impressive battles, such as the one in Crecy, and is clearly so interested in gaining fame and glory  – which is easily perceived by his insistence on being always the one who will devise the strategy to defeat the rival army – that he only remembers his promise to his dead father when it is thrown directly at his face by the forced coincidences of the plot. Passages like “Oh, there was that spear, yeah, I remember”, then, are alarmingly present. Even minor characters like Hobb and Guillaume have to basically make the protagonist remember the title of his series of novels.

Thomas is an archer and, because of that, a valuable member of the English army. The longbow’s capacity to slaughter half of a battalion before it can even approach its enemy was one of the crucial factors in making England the most fearsome force in Europe in the early fourteenth century. Therefore, knowing how much he is worth to the army and feeling satisfied while fighting for it, Thomas cannot glimpse what he could gain by abandoning his life in search of a spear that legends, in which he clearly doesn’t believe, say to be sacred.

Nevertheless, the plot surrounding the Hundred Years’ War, even though being shallow, is better than the search for the Grail, having even its own antagonist: the poor knight Sir Simon Jekyll, who, in search of fortune, ends up creating a personal quarrel with the archer. Simon’s character is much better developed than that of Harlequin – whom Bernard Cornwell simply describes as someone who always keeps his cool and tone of voice – and, throughout the novel, the reader may even come to sympathize a little – just a little – with the knight, as his motivations (fame and fortune) are much more understandable than those of the main villain, who remains an empty mystery.

Most of the characters in The Archer’s Tale follow, however, the characterization of Harlequin and not of Sir Simon, being empty stereotypes or considerably tiresome. Thomas, for example, is tall, handsome, and deadly. He likes women and murder, and his character development ends there. He is certainly not a person consumed by the desire for revenge or has any interesting aspirations to make up for his lack of personality. For him, just joining the army, proving himself crucial to its success, and going to bed with a woman is enough for him to be happy. 

The character of Joanette, in turn, suffers from Cornwell confusing complexity with inconsistency/ At the beginning of the book, in the siege of La Roche-Derrien, the character is presented as an enemy warrior famous for possessing excellent aim and a fierce personality, even being called Blackbird by those around her. However, after the city is besieged, she is portrayed as a fragile, whiny, silly, and irritating woman, who doesn’t even try to defend herself against injustice. The character at the beginning, Blackbird, is completely opposite to the woman who accompanies the protagonist for the rest of the novel, and she never again presents the rough and violent traces that were seen in La Roche-Derrien. Conflicting elements can often help build complex characters, but in Joannete’s case they are so absurd and disparate that they could never belong to the same individual.

By making St. George’s spear have little value even at the final battle, Cornwell shows that he prefers to write more about historical battles than to tell an intriguing story around them. If the novel was called “The Hundred Years’ War Chronicles, Volume 1 – The Archer’s Tale,” and the annoying Grail story was completely dropped, it would certainly have been, at least, a much more honest book.

December 06, 2018.

Originally published in Portuguese on March 11, 2015.