Kata and Tor

This is the author’s seventh and final novel set in the remote past, quite an achievement for someone in their mid-eighties. It takes place in 1066 but this time up North, with the Viking King Harald Hardrada planning to invade York. He uses his devoted son Tor as a scout to assess what the local opposition might amount to. But Tor then meets and falls for Kata, a beautiful Anglo-Saxon girl, and after that his loyalties remain conflicted. History cannot lie, and Tor does not make it at the final battle with Britain’s King Harold, on a roll before returning to his ultimate fate at Hastings. Kata in her turn decides to join a nun’s order with the intention of recording the part played by women in otherwise male-dominated history.

Crossley-Holland is good on local detail, but ultimately too many characters get in the way of the narrative. His main protagonists, while sympathetic enough, use contemporary language including phrases like ‘the nick of time’ not in use for another 500 years. He therefore misses out on a sense of the past as such a different sort of existence in the way that Rosemary Sutcliffe managed to bring off. Instead Tor and Kata talk about their budding relationship very much as committed and positive teenagers might today. Elsewhere, real wolves co-exist with references to casual wolf whistles.

Geoffrey Trease used to stress that every detail in his historical novels was based on sound research. The same could be said about this story, and readers will certainly be better informed about an otherwise neglected passage in our history. And as always, poetic phrases lighten up the main narrative, just as they have previously done in the author’s distinguished writing career stretching now to over sixty years.