Roberts doesn’t just take on Burgess’s style: he exploits the powerful synergy between his beliefs and the medieval world. Roberts duly follows him, taking a similar delight in describing the details of the Black Prince’s terminal dysentery Burgess was also obsessed by his own innards, which poured a rich stream of scatology through his writing. But while Burgess’s style sometimes set out to draw attention to his own brilliance, Roberts has a sharper focus on the human realities going on behind the verbal acrobatics.īurgess was not particularly good at representing women, and here they tend to be either victims of rape or gifted with second sight: Roberts misses the opportunity to widen his perspective. And of Julius, the king aptly named Seizer for his skill at conquest”. The foot soldiers at Crécy “had heard of Italy. Burgess loved puns, and Roberts offers many.

Like Wolf Hall it combines seeing the past from lots of unusual viewpoints with real insights into the inner workings of history, making you feel as though you’re at once inside it and watching it on film.īest known as a science fiction novelist, Roberts has written the book in a convincing pastiche of Burgess’s style (he has a part-time career writing parodies, which include The Soddit and The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo). The Black Prince is part of a great efflorescence of experimental historical fiction over the past few decades, of which Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is the most commercially successful example. Photograph: International Anthony Burgess Foundation These are voiced by a whole range of characters: if you want to see medieval Europe from the perspective of a blind king of Bohemia, a dog, a chicken seller, a Cornish miner, a mercenary, the mother of Richard III, or the Black Prince himself, this is the book for you.Īnthony Burgess in the early 1970s. Burgess said of his planned novel: “The effect might be of the fourteenth century going on in another galaxy where language and literature had somehow got themselves into the twentieth century.” Adam Roberts recreates that effect with panoramic camera swoops over Europe, inset newsreel headlines, and stream-of-consciousness accounts of the major battles of the century (Crécy, Poitiers, Nájera). It’s about the life and campaigns of Edward of Woodstock, eldest son of Edward III and father of Richard II, who defeated the French at Crécy and Poitiers, founded the Order of the Garter, and died of dysentery in 1376 before he could become king.īrought out by crowdfunded publisher Unbound, this is a weird and wonderful book on which no commercial publisher would have taken a punt. The Black Prince derives from a plan Anthony Burgess made for a novel in the early 1970s, and then turned into a screenplay for a film that was never made.

The black prince murdoch