The Shining Company - Rosemary Sutcliff

(Currently OOP. My edition: Bodley Head, 1990, 260 pages, ISBN: 0370314670)

It has been many years since Arthur, Britain’s famous warrior-king, drove the Anglo-Saxon invaders back from the lands of the Britons. Now the tide is beginning to turn once again, and Mynyddog, king of Gododdin, summons young princes from throughout the British tribes in a bid to forge a crack fighting force which could crush the Anglo-Saxon advance forever. Prosper, second son of a petty chieftain of Gwynedd, has longed to travel to the foreign lands of merchants' tales; but his call to adventure comes from much closer to home. Summoned by the Gwynedd prince Gorthyn, Prosper travels north alongside him to share in the training, the feasting, the drawing together of a brotherhood of warriors who will ride to meet the Anglo-Saxons at Catraeth. They are the Companions – the Shining Company.

Rosemary Sutcliff took her inspiration for the novel from a northern British poem, ‘Y Gododdin’, composed by the bard Aneirin some time in the 6^th or 7^th century. This tells of the titular tribe’s attack on Catraeth, whilst also eulogising the warriors involved. Many of those men named in the poem appear in the novel, but Prosper, along with his family and close friends, is fictional.

At the novel’s beginning, Prosper is still a boy with some growing to do. Honest, possessed of a sense of justice and given to bursts of compassion, nevertheless he can also be self-absorbed and bordering on arrogant where his inferiors are concerned. I sometimes found him hard to like, but the truth is that as well as being about the conflict between the Britons and the Anglo-Saxons, The Shining Company is about a boy maturing into a young man, gaining new perspectives and a deeper understanding of love, friendship, hatred; and, of course, war. This is a novel which doesn’t just show us a campaign and the warband fighting it, but takes a long, hard look at everything that goes into both, from the bonds and petty rivalries that grow during training, to the devastation of losing one’s companions in battle. Sutcliff has never been a writer to glorify war, but this novel stands out for me both for its vivid images, which manage to be raw yet not brutal, and its unflinching depiction of the acute mental distress, the anger, bewilderment and loneliness, felt by those warriors who have survived when their friends haven’t.

Like other Sutcliff novels I’ve read, The Shining Company elicits a profound sense of the past, not only in drawing the reader back to Prosper’s time, but in showing that Prosper, too, is aware of what has gone before. Carvings in an old Roman fort made by men long dead, which Prosper adds too; a boundary stone that, like those before him, he touches as he passes by; the myths and legends of pagan forebears – all these bring out a continuity, a sense of shared humanity, which throws the characters and events of the novel into relief. I’m not especially keen on the writing style Sutcliff uses here, which seems a little more old-fashioned than in some of her other novels and is inclined to produce a slightly stilted tone, but it does help to convey the stretch of time between narrator and reader, while at the same time remaining comprehensible. The prose seemed sparser than in some of the other novels by Sutcliff which I’ve read recently, but still had her characteristic touch, that limpid, immediate imagery which makes her characters and their surroundings both beautifully and hauntingly real.

A map at the front of the book places the relevant tribes within Britain and shows the major locations which appear in the novel, whilst an Author’s Note at the end gives the background to the story. 

Poignant tale of friendship and loss amid the conflicts of early medieval Britain.

Sword at Sunset - Rosemary Sutcliff

(Chicago Review Press, 2008, 495 pages)

First published in 1963, Sword at Sunset is perhaps Rosemary Sutcliff’s best known adult novel, a vivid re-imagining of the myth that is King Arthur. Sutcliff strips away the medieval ‘romance’ here, instead drawing sparingly on Welsh tradition, and grounding her tale very much in the realities of the post-Roman era, as the inhabitants of Britain struggle against not just the rising tide of the Anglo-Saxon ‘Sea Wolves’ and their allies, but dangerous division amongst themselves.  
The story is narrated by Sutcliff’s Arthur, Artos, as he lies dying of a battle wound in the monastery of the Island of Apples, and takes us on a journey from his early years as the Count of Britain, the canny head of a roving warband whose purpose is to break Anglo-Saxon power in Britain, through to his election as High King and beyond. But the novel doesn’t charge straight into battle: Sutcliff starts slowly, building up a detailed sense of Artos’ world and his character, so that although I was unsure about him at first, I gradually came to respect, and then to like him. Artos makes a thoroughly believable post-Roman warleader, not above using trickery and threats – even towards his own people – if it allows him to further his cause; but although he has his flaws, he’s also very human: dogged and made vulnerable by a fateful encounter in his home hills, committed to his cause, afraid of the loneliness accompanying authority, and in many respects honest, decent and loyal, it’s easy to empathise with him, and of all the characters in the book, he was my favourite. Sutcliff said that she was more 'deeply involved' with this novel than any other, and described herself as 'living' as Artos during the time she was writing it, and it’s perhaps a mark of this involvement that whilst her style is very distinctive, I never felt I was listening to anyone other than Artos himself. Her other characters were well drawn, their natures often deftly conveyed by just a few well chosen words, and the relationships between them are emotionally powerful and compelling – especially between Artos and his two closest companions, Guenhumara and Bedwyr.  
The descriptions of surroundings and events are, as ever, detailed and vibrant, especially visually – the passages depicting sunsets stand out particularly – which leaves a strong impression of having actually experienced them. Sutcliff, from what I’ve read of her work so far, wasn’t one to shy away from describing bloodshed and cruelty either, and this novel is no exception: there are several images of gut-wrenching violence, although it’s never gratuitous. 
As might be expected given the novel’s grounding, there’s no real magic in this book – and no Merlin, either, for that matter – only a strong sense of Fate, the whims of which some people can discern, and others can’t. At first I felt that the way in which Artos picked up each of his companions along the way seemed somewhat neat and linear, but viewed as part of the current of Fate, it makes perfect sense.
My only real niggle with the novel was the portrayal of the Little Dark People, a semi-subterranean race of pygmy people (rather like the Picts of legend) with Neolithic aspects, which occasionally brought me up short. But if I’m honest, they eventually blended in with the rest of the tale, and it ended up seeming as if they always had.
Overall, a masterful imagining of who and what the original ‘King Arthur’ may have been, well written and with deft references to the old legends. Towards the beginning of the novel, Artos, when trying Ambrosius the High King’s sword, speaks of it being ‘perfectly balanced’. I think the same can be said of Rosemary Sutcliff’s tale.