The Sharpe series of books

[matteus the inbred]

oh yeah, i remember that. Sharpe is undoubtedly a hard bastard, but it was indeed somewhat out of character.

well, i just felt that the manner in which Sharpe got into the situations in order to have a novel in the first place got very contrived when compared to the later books...but this is always a problem for authors rewriting or expanding a character's backstory and i am largely sympathetic to this sort of thing. but i do think the series was two or three books too long. i just hope we won't have a 'Sharpe's Beginning' or something similar dealing with the Flanders campaign.

the Arthurian series rocks and gave me a real enthusiasm for the period just as the original Sharpe books did, they should have read it before they made the recent film.

[GiantMonkeyMan]

i loved reading all the sharpe books because i found they very interesting and well written... so much in fact that it made me like the napoleonic era of histoire

[Incongruous]

Cornwell IMO is the best around as he manages to personalise and humanise characters such as Wellesley. His Sharpe books are excellent (all of them), Graile Quest was really good aswell, quite dark. His series on Arthur I didn't like, But The last kingdom was really good.

[King Henry V]

I just read the Pale Horseman, sequel to the Last Kingdom, anmd I highly recommend it. They way Cornwell describes the battle of Edington is simply the best he has ever written, IMO. From the start of the battle, where the two great shield walls of Danes and Saxons face each other, I could really feel the sense of fear men had, I could see myself stnading in those ranks, shield locked against shield and my bowels knotted and twisted in sheer terror! The battle continues with both speed and a great attention for detail, the rout of the Saxon right wing, the butcher of the Danish left and finally the assault upon the anicent fortress of Ethandun, sliding in the mud and blood up the steep slope...excellent writing.
There are two things which I'm not so keen on. The first is one of the most repeated phrases in his books: Fate is [bloody] inexorable! I am so damn fed up with this sentence, it appears at least half a dozen times in every book and I just can't stand reading it any longer.
Another things is that characters are quite unimagniative. The girls are basically the same: one is the dark, scrawny, fiesty girl who is as hard as nails: Teresa the guerilla, Nimue/Iseult the sorceress, Brida the East Anglian Dane-lover who also has some sorcery skills. Then there's the golden haired beauty who is so soft and kind: Jane Gibbon (admittedly she does go sour), Ceinwyn the Powysian princess and Aethelflaed, daughter of Alfred the Great (she's only a little girl in the Pale Horseman, but you can predict she'll be Uhtred next love because Iseult foretells he'll capture Bebbanburg with a woman of gold and he swears allegiance to Alfred just because Aethelflaed is looking at him...).
Uhtred is very much a rehash of Dervel, boy born on one side, raised by another and fights against his own blood (albeit Uhtred gets some sense into him and fights for the Saxons). Nearly all his main characters are bastards and the hero's mother almost never appears. This is reflective of the fact that Cornwell was himself illegitimate, a war baby of a Canadian pilot and an English WAAF, given up for adoption and raised by members of the Peculiar People, a Puritanical sect who forbade television and medicine (ironically, Cornwell went on to become a TV producer for the BBC). This shown in many instances: somebody falls ill, stupid Christian prayers don't save them, but then pagan person comes, chants a few things, pisses in the corner and throws a few herbs around and ill person gets better .
But apart from these foibles, I find Cornwell to be a very good writer, he tells excellent stories, his characters just need a bit more working on. However, a suppose that is one of the effects of being a very succesful writer, your well of originality runs dry and you basically have to recycle people.

[matteus the inbred]

hmmmm. that's all very interesting King Henry V...i haven't read Pale Horseman, but i agree, he does lack some originality in his characters and 'stock phrases' start to appear. i find many of his Irish characters to be glib rascals largely indistinguishable from each other, for example. still, so many books, only one author, it's bound to happen.

i actually lost interest in his books for a while due to the Starbuck series, when every battle scene became so similar i couldn't be bothered...the last book was about Antietam(Sharpsburg) and just went on and on...i think a rest from the nineteenth century did him good.