Book Review

Stormbird, by Conn Iggulden

In the world of historical fiction, Conn Iggulden is a well-established heavyweight. His previous work includes two best-selling novel series about the lives of Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan. The plot of Stormbird centers on the so called Wars of the Roses, which was fought in England between 1455 and 1487. The war was called thusly because of the main combatants, the houses of York and Lancaster, both had a rose on their coat of arms, a white rose for York and a red one for Tudor.    

With all the horticulture you could possibly need to know dispensed with, we must now briefly turn to the conflict itself. The Wars of the Roses was a bitter and bloody epoch in England´s history, yet it is one that has not been very prominent in popular culture and I suspect most people would struggle if asked to describe what the conflict was about. Even for myself, who loves to study and read about both history and military history, the Wars of the Roses seemed to have been an exceptionally drawn out, complicated and messy conflict. When you first open the book to smell the fresh ink, presuming you order a second-hand copy from Amazon, you are assaulted by several pages of family trees showing the royal houses of England. These are a winding, byzantine mess that would make George RR Martin himself proud. The gist of it is that after the strong warrior king Henry V dies, the crown passes to the runt of the litter, his weakling son Henry VI. The perils of a hereditary monarchy are thus clearly illustrated to the reader, much like when Warren buffet once said that it is like choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold medal winners from the 2000 Olympics. He was talking about the perils of not having an effective estate tax, but his metaphor seems applicable in Stormbird´s case as well.

With a naive boy prone to fainting sickness sitting on the throne of England, vultures and opportunists were bound to pounce sooner or later. Richard, the Duke of York, was a warlike man of great swagger who rather fancied a more powerful ruler of England, preferably himself, and so the stage was set for a devastating civil war that ravaged England and pitted the distant, blue blooded relatives of the previously mentioned family trees, against each other.  

As the drama unfolds, we are introduced to a host of characters who all inhabit the damp and misty island of Britain. Besides the young king, Henry VI, there is his young and headstrong French queen and a grizzled old spymaster who is, like Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, too old for his job. This trio faces off against the house of York and their many allies. Truth be told King Henry VI also has a large number of loyal noble houses and barons he can count on for support, but the delicate power balance between York and Lancaster tips ever so slightly in the favor of the latter after our poor boy-king isn´t man enough (boy enough doesn´t sound very forceful) to rise to the occasion and prevent the lion´s share of England’s French provinces from being lost. 

I told you earlier that Richard was the head of the house of York and King Henry´s deceitful nemesis. I only know this because I looked on the back of the cover. This is unfortunately one of the reasons why Stormbird doesn´t quite live up to Iggulden´s previous novels. With the exception of young French queen injecting some Gallic passion into the storyline, none of the characters were particularly memorable. As soon as I had put down the book they more or less disappeared completely from my memory. I never felt that I was particularly moved or invested in any of them, truth be told.

For someone who is writing about the lives of Genghis Khan and Julius Caesar, like Iggulden has done, there is a treasure trove of material, a veritable smorgasbord of epic battles, larger than life characters and world-changing events. I didn´t read any of those books to revel in Iggulden´s writing, is what I have come to realize. My interest was piqued by Caesar and Genghis and their extraordinary lives. This, I believe, cuts to the heart of the matter of why Stormbird isn´t quite up my alley. The events and characters Iggulden has chosen to write about this time are nowhere near as colorful or epic as those he has tackled in the past. The Wars of the Roses was a conflict played out on an infinitely smaller scale than the conquests of Genghis, where his Mongol hordes conquered the largest empire in history, stretching from China all the way to Central Europe. Bernard Cornwell, I have long argued, is a titan among men when it comes to writing historical fiction due to his effortless prose and ability to tell a great story. Even though he wrote more Sharpe novels than there are grains of sand in the Kalahari Desert, he always managed to deliver.  

Stormbird is certainly interesting from a historical perspective and this conflict is very different from anything Iggulden has written about in the past. Unfortunately it fails to excite me as much as I had thought it would. I read Stormbird while waiting to catch a flight at the airport, and that is probably where is best suited, to whittle away an hour or two until the tax-free shop opens.