Brethren - Robyn Young

A slight departure for this one: I've talked about reviewing what I term 'Historical Fiction' before - that is, taking a fictitious character but placed in a genuine historic event during a war - and I've written about what Mallinson does with a Napoleonic Dragoon. Well, time to switch attention to the heavy mob, the Knights Templar during the Crusades - big men on big horses with big swords taking big lumps out of people.

What Young is very good at is what I might term setting the scene; the descriptions of London and Paris during the late 1200's are convincing enough that I can picture the cramped alleyways, see the dark streets and smell the shit on the cobbles (or maybe that's just my loo backing up again?). When we get to Outremer (the Crusader holdings in the Holy Land) I can picture the great limestone fortress of Safed glinting white in the harsh sunlight, feel the heat shimmering from the ground, taste the dryness at the back of my throat. Very evocative and very effective.

The story as it stands, alas, I am compelled to record as somewhat formulaic: secret book gets stolen from the Knights Templar, enough to condemn them all to the stake many times over. Book gets nicked by someone else and pursued by both original thieves and original owners across France. Book is swiped by someone else again and taken to Outremer, now with three factions after it. Book gets recaptured by original owners. Book is destroyed. Yada-yada-yada.

I must also record that the military side of things is depressingly thin on the ground. Okay, this is before the 5th Crusade has started properly and yes, we do get the siege of Safed, the torching of Antioch and so on but in 641 pages there's not a lot of it, especially not for a book where one of the main protagonists are the mightiest band of elite warriors in the Christian West - I mean, these guys had enough military and financial clout to be able to tell Kings and Emperors where to get off. The second is a single man, Baybars.

Now Baybars is interesting, not least because comparatively little is ever written about him compared to Saladin. But this was a real man who rose from a position of slavery (all the Mamluk warriors of Egypt were slaves, though latterly only technically) to become Sultan and actually achieved more than Sladin ever did - it was he who managed to kick the Crusaders out of the Holy Land once and for all.

So much for war. This is, more or less, a detective/crime book more than what you might think based on the cover for it. Annoying, but it was perhaps naive of me to think otherwise. Still disappointing though.

Young is good at setting a scene, creating believable characters and postulating about what or indeed who the Templars might have been (the transition from aspirant to Knight is particularly engrossing) and plonking them all into reality. The unfortunate bit is that this reality is not as action packed as you might expect.

7 out of 10 if you want a good book.
4 out of 10 if you want a military tale.