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sheenaghpugh
“But things feel strange – they feel different. Like this is a waiting time. Like when you see dark clouds riding in, and swelling, and you know that before long there’ll be a storm.”
The publisher labels this novel as being for ages 12 and upwards; in other words it’s one of those that get labelled YA because the protagonists are aged about 15. I’ve never been entirely sure why this fact should automatically render a book YA rather than adult, particularly since, these days, the designation doesn’t mean a certain amount of sex and violence can’t be included. I don’t feel I need to be a pensioner to interest myself in Lear, and though I may no longer be 15, I do recall what it was like. Certainly I did not feel, when reading this as an adult, that the author was simplifying his message or vocabulary for a young audience in a way he wouldn’t have for adults, which is just as well, because young readers notice and resent that. It is a fairly short novel, which perhaps is the one concession.
It is set in the neighbourhood of York in the year 1066. Kata, a 15-year-old girl living in the village of Riccall, is finding life dull, and longs for more interesting times. “Is this all there is? Kata thought. Ploughing and planting, and weeding, haymaking, harvesting… Round and round and round.”
Things are of course about to get infinitely more interesting, because Harald Hardrada has landed with an army and is about to claim the kingdom. He has with him an illegitimate son called Tor (not an historical character) the same age as Kata. While Tor is scouting for the Norwegian army, he and Kata happen to meet, and fall in love on sight. This is obviously inconvenient, given the circumstances, and Tor, who has no previous experience of war, was already conflicted by having watched his father’s troops burn Scarborough:
“Before long, Tor could hear timber crackling and spitting, the roar and updraught of flames blazing, sucking and whistling. He could see men and women and children running away from their huts and shacks; he thought of the old people inside them, unable to escape.
“I’ve come to help these people”, the king shouted to his son. “I’ve no quarrel with them. No wish to hurt them. But if they resist me… Well, the word will soon spread. This is a warning.”
Hardrada, in fact, is your archetypal warmonger, convinced of his own rightness and justifying his actions as such men always do; these days he would be talking about collateral damage. Tor, scouting incognito among the locals, gets to know them as individuals. He also comes to realise how racially mixed their community actually is, and how the war will fracture it. Nevertheless, his loyalty to, and admiration for, his fearsome father are equally strong in him.
Kata’s conflict, in the end, is less between her love for Tor and her feelings for her people than between a longing for novelty and adventure and a wish to escape the turmoil unfolding in her world. This crystallizes around a convent she visits in York:
“Everything within seemed so peaceful and straightforward, while the world without was so uncertain and dangerous, and yet … yet so alive.
I want to be within, she thought, but I need to be without. Both.”
While I know women in Saxon times had more agency than later under the Normans, I did wonder if a girl, and one of Kata’s age, would do, or contemplate, quite so much journeying on her own. Enabling girls to do interesting things is always a problem for historical fiction writers, and unless they use the old trope of disguising their heroines as boys, their only option is probably to make them rather more self-reliant and determined than the norm – Kata, unlike Tor, is an orphan, another classic way of giving fictional children more agency.
The love-at-first-sight story is no more unlikely than Romeo and Juliet, and their feelings are quite credibly and sympathetically drawn. But for me the main focus of the story was the effect of war on ordinary people. The vengeful racial violence that erupts in York against Scandinavians who have lived peacefully side by side with English neighbours for decades, the burning and looting of essential winter stores, the ruin of a tranquil landscape. When the headman of her village predicts where the battle will take place, Kata asks what is really the novel’s crucial question:
“The earls, they’ll draw up somewhere around here”, he added. That’s my guess.”
Kata stared at the scrub to her left, and the boggy water meadows across the river, and the sweet water, now running so softly, ribbed with blood light from the lowering sun.
“Do they have to?” she asked.
