It sometimes seems there are two types of historical novel published in the UK: those with Bernard Cornwell’s endorsement on the cover, and those without. Cornwell is the daddy of historical fiction, and generous to his competition with it, and Raven hit the bookshops with his name adorning the cover. I mention this firstly because committed Cornwell fans will always be looking for similar new books to fill the gaps between his own works being published, and because Giles Kristian’s debut is, if anything, the work of an author who has taken the Cornwell formula and improved on it.

It would be easy to write this entire review as a comparison between Raven and Cornwell’s own Dark Age tales of Vikings in England. The similarities are significant: both concern a young warrior with loyalties divided between his home land and the camaraderie of the raiding Vikings (although the word Viking is seldom used in either – Cornwell’s are Danes and Kristian’s Norsemen). Both seek to gain maximum mileage from the contrast between the emergent Christian faith and the dark paganism of the Vikings. And both have lots of swords, shield walls, blood and guts and violent adventure.

Raven is a teenager when the Norse come – he remembers nothing before two years previously, and is shunned by most of the villagers of Abbotsend, who are superstitious about his one red eye, the result of a blood clot. It turns out that he can speak the Norse tongue when the raiders come, and when they depart, trailing death and destruction, Raven is taken with them, becoming an accepted part of ‘the Wolfpack’, loyal to the Jarl Sigurd, leader of the band, and keen for adventure – for the superstitious Norse, Raven’s blood-eye marks him out for great things.

Adventure there is, aplenty, and it has all of the classic ingredients for this type of fiction: a manipulative nobleman, a scheming priest, a beautiful but unattainable woman and a band of honour-obsessed (and woman and beer obsessed) warriors who careen from one blood-soaked encounter to another. It’s pacy stuff, and enjoyably written (if occasionally overblown), though again the parallels with Cornwell are appreciable: first person narrative, with an old warrior looking back over his adventures (and, dare I say it, this perhaps feels a little bit fresher, livelier, than Cornwell’s prose). I particularly like the contrast between the deep-rooted paganism of the Norse and the nascent Christianity of the English, especially the ways that the Norse have to translate Christian theology in to their own terms, as if imagining a showdown between Thor or Odin and ‘the White Christ’.

Raven: Blood Eye is an enjoyable debut and a promising start to the planned trilogy which does enough to distinguish itself from what has come before: our sympathies here are more with the Norse than the English, and Kristian is not afraid of showing the darker side of the warrior life, even having Raven commit rape after the conclusion of one particularly bloody assault on a Welsh fortress (though he acts under pressure of expectation from his peers and regrets it immediately). The crude Norsemen are worthy subjects for this kind of adventure, and I very much look forward to finding out where Raven will end up next, and what ways he will find to get revenge for the betrayals and chaos that will inevitably follow.

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