The Black Prince (2018)

By Adam Roberts

320pp, Fiction

Notes

2019-03-01

Adam Robert’s The Black Prince is a more ambitious affair [than The Daylight Gate], it mixes accepted historical facts about its subject with apocrypha and anachronistic media reports in the style of Dos Pasos’s USA Trilogy. I really enjoyed this. It is uneven but enjoyably so and Roberts holds it all together with aplomb. The battle scenes in particular manage a fine balance between excitement and revulsion only fully tipping over into the latter for the books bloody climax; the aftermath of the siege of Limoges, which TBH I had to skip through after the first few pages of slaughter as all the stabbing and chopping was getting too much for me.

Apart from anything else it was good to read a couple of books about truly horrific historical periods: Oh my god, the Hundred Years War and the Black Death, at the same time! religious persecution during the reign James I! Made me feel a little less bleak about our own historical moment.