The Lute Player Book

Before I get into the full review, I want to say that although I would recommend The Lute Player, I absolutely would not recommend my edition - the 2008 Torc/Tempus. Anyone with less than 20/20 vision is practically going to need a magnifying glass to read the tiny words crammed onto the page. The pages and the cover are very fragile - it looks terribly dog eared after only two reads, the back cover ripped half off simply by the weight of it open in my hand AND the plastic on the cover melted and peeled off when - shock horror - I sat outside for half an hour when it was 20 degrees out. Oh, and it is riddled with spelling mistakes - although whether this is the edition or the original text I couldn't say. Pretty poor anyway.

So, moving on to the review... There's a certain cult built up around Richard the Lionheart. Even though he rather disliked England and only bothered to visit a couple of times when he absolutely had to, even though he viewed England purely as a purse to fund his gallivanting around the Middle East, even though he abandoned us to the tyranny of Prince/King John... people love him. Norah Lofts loved him. I love him. No matter how much I hear that he's nothing like as shiny and heroic as people view, no matter how often I read about his failings... I still love him. If anything The Lute Player has made me love him all the more, even though it is not even remotely an idealised portrait. Even Blondel, the lute player of the title, determined to hate him for his maltreatment of Berengaria, doesn't manage it. His respect for Richard is grudging, but it grows and grows. You just can't read about him chipping in, working with the common man, making sure even the lowliest soldier was looked after, and not admire him.

The Lute Player covers a long-ish period before, during, and after the Third Crusade and is told from several perspectives, each of which has been well formed by Lofts - all too often differing voices are written indistinctly, but not so here - there is a real sense of who is talking at any given moment. First, we are introduced to Blondel, the lute player (who is a figure of legend, but may or may not have existed). We see him initially through his beginnings in a monastery, from which he drops out being too compassionate to cope with the self-centredness of the churchmen, and then again when he writes his experiences of the Crusade, from alongside Richard. Our second (and final) voice is Anna, Duchess of Apieta, crippled half-sister of Berengaria of Navarre. I'm rather sad to say that Anna is not a historical figure because she is just wonderful (though she would probably roll her eyes at me saying that!). She's sensible, she's wise and witty, she's kind but not saccharine, a little bit sarcastic and there's this great story built up around her conception and life. I very much wish she was real! The voice for the middle section is Eleanor of Aquitaine. Her section shows us Loft's skill quite as much as the others - we really get a good idea of who she was. It's a pretty realistic portrayal going from my perception of her but it's not unsympathetic. She comes across as fierce and yet we get the sense that she's really just trying to be a good mother. It is in this section that we first come across the notion that Richard may have been gay (there is a fair amount of scholarly debate over this). It is arguably a carefully considered and fairly compassionate portrayal of homosexuality, particularly considering that The Lute Player was written back in the late 1940s/early 1950s.

For all that I feared this might be a dull read - dry with endless descriptions of battle and life on Crusade (I prefer my history day-to-day rather than battles, women more than men if I'm honest) and perhaps rather dated (odd to think of historical fiction as being dated, but it can be!) - it was actually highly entertaining and not even once did I feel bored. In the foreword, Lofts tells us her hope that the reading would be without disappointment or fatigue and that it most definitely was.