When I visit the library I start at the new book shelves. It is getting harder all the time to find anything in the regular stacks. 55 years of visiting libraries puts a dent in what is of interest. I have decided to focus on new books or classics that I have avoided over the years. Thus I read through the writing of Abraham Lincoln, the Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant and The Travels of Marco Polo this summer. I am currently working through Pride and Prejudice and the Journals of Lewis and Clark.
On my last trip I came across a book called Hawk Quest by Robert Lyndon. The cover made it sound good and the first 644 pages are an engaging adventure set in the pre-Crusade world of Europe and the Middle East. It is only in the last 14 pages that the cheap-shot attacks on Christianity are slipped in like poison. Once you have grown to admire the characters and gone through their trials, sorrows and joys the author makes them mouth some of the dull heresies that are repeatedly treated as new and fresh truth.
If you like realistic, well written and researched stories with sword fights, conflict, romance and heart break, Lyndon gives it to you. This is a good story. If you like people acting like the Gospel of Thomas was rejected by a church conspiracy and characters denying the truth of the Bible and the Divinity of Christ, this is also for you. None of this second theme shows up until the final pages but it seems to be the real reason Lyndon wrote the book.
You can learn a lot from good historical fiction. Lyndon does a good job of getting into the intricacies of feudal culture. He portrays the conflict between the Saxons and their new Norman overlords. He gives insight into the legal structures and relations between different nations and cultures. He does this without being cumbersome with detail. The learning fits in well with the enjoyment of the story.
The characters are well balanced. There are a few who seem total losers and some who are truly noble. Most grow and develop through their experiences. They do not all survive for a happy ending which keeps you wondering how it will all end up. Except for a few pages of politically correct, anti-Christian bile this is a good read.
That is the good part.
To be continued...
Lyndon, Robert. Hawk Quest. New York: Redhook, 2013.
homo unius libri
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Comments are welcome. Feel free to agree or disagree but keep it clean, courteous and short. I heard some shorthand on a podcast: TLDR, Too long, didn't read.