Book Review: Robert the Bruce

Robert the Bruce: King of the Scots

by Michael Penman

Yale University Press, 2014

This summer marks the 700^th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, the epic confrontation in June 1314 between the English troops of Edward II and the Scottish forces of the near-legendary Scottish national hero Robert the Bruce, who was not only present at the battle but also active in the battle, swinging his broadaxe and dirking his foes at close range. He and his forces were greatly outnumbered by the English and yet, over the course of two grueling days, they routed their opponents and secured the independence of Scotland – which was good news for Scotland but bad news for generations of Bruce biographers to come.

Those biographies have been thick on the ground in the intervening centuries, especially since the Victorians embraced the subject's unassuming valor and Arthurian idealism, and the result, all too often, has been books that are long on heroism and short on substance. A great many of these biographies have tended to forget that the Robert the Bruce who fought for two days at Bannockburn was also the King Robert I who ruled Scotland for twenty years. Michael Penman's new book, Robert the Bruce: King of the Scots - a solid brick in the hand - soars above its kindred titles mainly on the strength of its author's determination to see Robert in the broader context of his reign:

… without denying his undoubted personal drive, magnetism and political and military abilities, arguably the strongest theme to emerge from a detailed survey of all of Robert's reign is the degree to which he was surrounded and shaped by an impressive circle of community leaders committed to the full restoration of the independent kingdom and its liberties and customs.

The book is prodigiously researched (the tiny-type notes and sources at the back are just about as comprehensive as anything you're going to find on this subject; this will be the starting-point for all 21st century work on the subject) and fluidly written, drawing the reader into the complexities of Robert's world with remarkable ease and remarkably few dry patches. We follow the Bruce and his friends, allies, and enemies through time and personal changes, and Penman is particularly skilled at bringing to life the internecine squabbles that will always feature prominently in any story of one country newly gaining its freedom from another. And although Penman tells a more thoroughly contextualized version of the story than any previous biographer, Robert the man has never been more effectively portrayed - so much so that Penman's descriptions of his long and awful final decline is all the more moving. Even in 1527, still two years before his death, the Bruce's deteriorating health is a public scandal as he doggedly continues to go about the tasks of kinship in a world far from the bright blood morning of Bannockburn:

In all of this, there is undeniably a growing sense of Bruce impatience not to be denied this time and to effect a lasting settlement with England. The added pressure here was surely Robert's own deterioriating healt as well as his generally aging Scottish war generation: a pressing need to secure favourable peace terms before the minority of David II began and that of Edward III ended. It was reported back to York that while in Ulster Robert 'was so feeble and so weak that he will not last much longer from this time, with the help of God because he cannot move anything except his tongue.'

Readers who long ago thrilled to the terrific historical novels of Nigel Tranter's Robert the Bruce trilogy will find in Penman's big volume a more complex and grounded figure, clothed more in the latest scholarship than in the oldest legends. And, very winningly, they'll find much the same man in the center (since Tranter was no slouch himself when it came to research): fearless, prickly, pragmatic, cannily intelligent - and, after all, perhaps just a bit larger than life. One of the year's best biographies - enthusiastically recommended.

Book Review: The Black Hour

The Black HourBy Lori Rader-DaySeventh Street Books, 2014  Lori Rader-Day's thrillingly good debut mystery novel, The Black Hour, turns on a dolefully touchstone issue in the 21st century: school shootings. The school in question is Chicago's Rothbert University, and the shooting in question had only one casualty (besides the shooter, who killed himself): sociology professor Amelia Emmet, who was critically injured by this student she'd didn't know and had never seen before.As the book opens, it's been almost a year since the shooting, and Emmet has taken that time to recover, going through extensive physical therapy in a grueling process that finds her back on campus still using painkillers to get through the day. Emmet is a wonderful creation on Rader-Day's part, easily the most memorably-realized character in the book, and when she finally does return to her old job at the university, she's naturally full of bitter curiosity about the tragedy that struck her out of nowhere, as she expresses with typical bluntness while having a beer with her friend and colleague Joss:

"From everyone else's perspective, I'm back, so it's over," I said. "But that's not how it feels.”She nodded long and slow, and reached for my beer. "I'll drink this, so you can keep your promise to Corinne.”"I feel like I did die, like I was dead and you all forgot to tell me. And when I came back today, you clapped and smiled, but you looked like – like you'd seen a ghost." I grabbed the beer out of her hand and sat back in the booth. The pain meds had begun to ebb a bit. I felt sharp, poised. Ready. I wasn't quite sure what I was ready for.“Ten months lost, Joss. I have a few questions.”

Her questions start out as simple as universal as those of any violence-survivor: why did this happen? Who was my attacker? Why me? And the stroke of genius in Rader-Day's book is that Amelia Emmet isn't the only person asking those questions; she has a new teaching assistant, a graduate student named Nathaniel Barber who's decided, for reasons of his own, to make Professor Emmet's shooting the subject of his dissertation. Barber has been abjured to channel his naturally aggressive curiosity, to shape and guide it:

"Dear Mr. Barber. The point isn't necessarily to choose what you're looking for, but to choose to look. If you choose to in a way that is serious, consistent, methodological and scientific, you will find. If you look with open eyes and open mind, Mr. Barber, you will find a line of questioning that you can expand and explore.”

Barber decides to put these methodological techniques to use in deciphering what happened to Emmet, and being the object of such obviously multi-motivated study naturally doesn't sit well with her; Rader-Day does a brilliant job of conveying the prickly tension between these two. Emmet hasn't done the best job of dealing with her own trauma or the irritating holes that still remain in her memory of what happened to her:

I reached into my memory, pushed past the white room, the warm hand resting on me, the ambulance, the red carpet rushing toward my face, the dark outline of the student, the gun rising out of the shadow – past that, past that. Past the stuff I couldn't quite remember into the stuff I didn't want to.The book's ingenious premise makes it inevitable that the second and third acts will be veritably teeming with suspense (who knows more than they're saying? What, beyond random chance, was behind the shooting, and the shooter?), and Rader-Day manipulates and sharpens the suspense like she's been doing this for forty years. Which makes it delightful to contemplate what she'll be writing in forty years.