Supriya's Reviews > The Lantern Bearers

Boys' Own melancholia, immensely sad and bittersweet. It's interesting that a story that pits the ~British~ against vile marauding Saxons (how Tolkien would have frowned) should consistently strike a note of such Nordic stoicism, the urging of the fight in the face of all honour and chance of glory lost. But in a very English way, what could be more sentimental? This novel could only have been written after two World Wars, after all.

I love Sutcliff's version of Arthuriana (the young Celtic-Roman Arthur is a supporting character in this book). I also really enjoyed her grave, uncompromising style, working with the same resources again and again to enhance the rhythm of the narrative through repetition. I'm more discomfitted than I can explain immediately by the replacement of her slight, bromance-y young Romans with the solemn, aggrieved Turin Turambar-like figure (with some key differences) who is the protagonist of the story. The Lantern Bearers is significantly darker than The Silver Branch, which in its turn was much darker than The Eagle of the Ninth -- indeed, a third of the way through the youngest Aquila's fate, you can only think wistfully back to Marcus and Esca scrabbling through marshlands pretending to be oculists in wistful remembrance of how jolly it must all have been.

I'm never a fan of the narrative of civilisational decline, which is why my whole approach to this project of Sutcliff's has been unserious in the first place. But she also says, I think early on in the Eagle of the Ninth, that what may be unthinkable for a society is possible for an individual, when she talks about Esca and Marcus bridging the gulf between them. So I see why it becomes possible, even thinkable, to read the loose sequence of destiny that binds Marcus to Justin and Flavius and J & F to Aquila for themselves, as a narrative of transformation. Which is something quite different.