Sometime earlier this year I bought Sharpe’s Eagle, a book by Bernard Cornwell. I’m not exactly sure why, but I then started to buy not only the other books in the series, but also books by Bernard Cornwell that I’d have no interest in, other than the author being the same.

For the last eight months or so the three books which comprise Cornwell’s Grail Quest have sat on the bookshelf. I also have his Warlord saga looking out at me, and I decided I wanted to polish off at least one of his trilogies before 2009 arrived. Owing to the extremely alluring cover of Harlequin, the first in the series, the Grail Quest got the nod to go first.

Based at the start of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) in South-West England, we meet Thomas of Hookton, whose mad father Ralph is a local priest. Raiders from France arrive and put the village to the sword. Thomas, who has secretly been learning archery, kills his first four men.

We later find out that the man leading the raid is Thomas’s cousin, Guy Vexille, the Harlequin. The Vexille family, of which Ralph was a member, are Cathars, escapees from the mother church and reputedly holders of the Holy Grail. Now orphaned, Thomas joins the army of Edward III as an archer and heads off to France.

The series takes lots of twists and turns, such that I can’t actually recall the ins and outs of each story. As one might expect, there are women that come and go, various nobels both good and bad, and some dodgy religious characters, not least Dominicans, examples of whom inflict torture on more than a few of the characters.

I thought that these were OK, but not really my cup of tea. Still, Harlequin, Vagabond, and Heretic are all out of the way at least. I think I’ll hold off before trying my hand at the Warlord Chronicles.

Tags: Bernard Cornwell

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.