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El Ojo De Raven (2000)

by Giles Kristian(Favorite Author)

3.96 of 5 Votes: 3

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

series

Raven

review 1: My Freshman year in college I took a Introduction to the Arts class during the interim period of January. Most of the kids where home from break, but I used that month to eat up a gen ed credit. During that class we were taught the concept of the willing suspension of disbelief. Naturally it's a concept we all understand from the moment we pick up our first book or watch our first movie. There has to be a willingness on the part of the audience to put the implausibility of the story aside, and buy in. The process needs to work both ways though. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who coined the term, understood that the burden rests mainly in the lap of the writer. That it's the author's job to convince the audience, that no matter how fantastical the events are, that it actua... morelly may be the truth. When a writer and his reader can't meet in the middle, both are left with disappointments.I can't speak to the historical accuracy of a book set in 802 AD. I know absolutely nothing about Vikings or the English during that time period. From what I do now, I think it's fair to say the author spent a lot of time researching the time period in order to portray,in detail, the life of an English peasant or Viking warrior during the period. Where my disbelief started to override the author's writing was in how Osric, aka Raven, changed, and in the speed those changes took place in.Osric is, which is explained later, a foundling child who was found and because of his permanently blood shot eye is given to the only person in the village willing to deal with a child who is so marked by the Devil. His age is never really explained, but I would assume he would have been in his early adolescence. Fast forward a few years and as he is walking towards the shore to fish for mackrel, he spots two Viking ships coming ashore. Within a few minutes he is starting to understand their language, and in no time at all, he not only understands it, but speaks it's fluently. It's left to assume that the Norse language is actually his real language, and English was one he learned from the villagers. My problem with this is that he never knew he spoke this Viking language. If he was picked up English from the villagers, who feared him, he would still remember his native language and would not forget knowing it. So unless Odin gives him the gift of language from the very beginning, it's just too far of a stretch for me to make.The rest of my issues are just an extension of the first. He learns how to use a sword in within the span of one paragraph. Within a few chapters (a couple of days of travel), he is not only able to best seasoned warriors during practice, but he is killing men with ease. That's not even counting the fact that the Vikings killed every grown adult male in the village, kidnapped him and his mute mentor, and threatened their lives more than once. It takes him little time, or thought really, to throw off the teaching of the Christian church and the little life he actually remembers, and jumps right on board the Viking way of life. He starts praying to their gods, cursing and killing like it's going out of style, all within a few weeks. I've seen characters change and adapt to new situations, but I've never seen one due it so casually.All of this is surrounded by pretty intense violent action and lots and lots of bad language. Neither of those things are a bad thing, they were actually the more interesting parts of the book for me. It's a pretty standard coming of age story set in a violent world where Vikings were to be feared and the English couldn't be trusted, at least according to this book. It's the first of a series that is just now being published in the US. I'm just hoping that the next book will be just a bit more believable.
review 2: I won't bang on about the plot: Young man meets Vikings, is taken in, finds he is a natural killer and has bloody adventures in Southern England in the 8/9th century. That about sums it up.I like Vikings, for a whole parcel of reasons. I studied them at university, and married a lady Viking. I've had this lying around for aged and fancied something Norse. Blood Eye adequately captures the spirit of the era and is overall entertaining, but there are some major issues with it.Firstly, although the prose is very well written, the structure is poor, with not one but two pairs of near identical incidents. In the first act of the book the Vikings are twice invited into mead halls, where friendly feasting turns violent. In the third act, our hero Raven is rescued at the last minute by the unexpected arrival of his Viking pals, again twice. Sure, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility, but it's slack storytelling that should have been ironed out.Secondly, global amnesia is the hokiest plot device in the world (when we meet the protagonist he's living in an English village and can't remember anything from before a couple of years ago. Is he English? Is he Norse? Read the whole series to find out if he's secretly the son of the king of Norway!) It takes a lot for me to forgive amnesia, and there's not quite good enough in here for such forgiveness to be forthcoming.Thirdly, there's the odd historical innacuracy (to my mind at least). Pines are mentioned a few times as growing in England, but there are only two conifer types native to Britain - the Scots pine and the Yew. (Yeah, yeah, picky, picky). Pines were never grown widely here until relatively recently. Also, and this is something that I always grumble about when reading Dark Age era fiction, is the level of mutual intelligibility between Norse and Old English. It's debateable how much, but there was at least some, even the modern descendants of the languages have a lot of similarities, so Norsemen standing around talking loudly about killing Old English speakers in total safety wouldn't be possible. As I see it, anyway. Bernard Cornwell handles both the "torn identity" (admittedly, it's a useful narrative in to the world) and language issue better in his Viking stories.But, the main character is extremely engaging, and it's well written. Perhaps I'll check out the others in the series. less

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