Stonehenge - Bernard Cornwell

Stonehenge - the place - is a fascinating experience: unforgettable, built for unknown reasons and requiring unimaginable cost and effort to complete. Stonehenge - the book -is a very dull experience: instantly forgettable, written for unknown reasons and requiring unimaginable cost and effort to read. The word "epic" always makes me pause for thought. When describing books or films, it can mean one of two things. It can signify a fascinating, ambitious, multi-layered plot which spans vast timescales or geographical locations. Alternatively, it can mean a long-winded tale which has pretensions of grandeur, but which in reality is just an ...  Read the complete review

Stonehenge is a historical novel set 2000 years before the birth of Christ, and offers an explain the construction of Stonehenge. The story is centered around three brothers from the tribe of Ratharynn; The hotheaded warrior Lengar, his younger, initially weaker brother Saban, and the crippled and deformed outcast and self-made sorceror Camaban. Cornwell does a good job of bringing to life a cruel world in which the will of the Gods can be read from every shaft of sunlight, tremble of a branch and flight of a bird, in which the cunning yet unhinged Camaban rises to prominence and seeks to build a vast temple to bring together Slaol, the god of the Sun and ...  Read the complete review

The fact is I rarely read historical fiction. This is something of a surprise given my love of historical fact. I always did like history at school and it was my strongest subject (in a pretty weak line up). So for all that maybe it was only a matter of time before I finally explored a relatively new genre for me in the form of Bernard Cornwell’s “Stonehenge”. Set in Neolithic Britain, “Stonehenge” is a fictional account of how the world famous stone temple may have come to be. Part fiction, part hypothesis, the story follows three brothers whose lives criss-cross and intertwine against the backdrop of the lengthy building process of the Sky Temple ...  Read the complete review

Bernard Cornwell attempted to do a very brave thing. It is not many authors who would try and write a book based on events that happened in the year 2000 BC but this is what he has done. In his book Stonehenge, Cornwell attempts to record the events leading up to and the actual building of Stonehenge. Not an easy task but I think he carries it off very well. The books main character is Saban who is a member of the tribe from Ratharryn. He will lead his tribe in the building of the magnificent Stonehenge - a legacy that we can still see today. The book also concerns itself with the tribal feuds between other tribes and also those internal. Saban has a ...  Read the complete review

The title I have selected for my opinion on this book reflects, I hope, the overall tone of this opinion. The book is one that appeals on many levels, but, I uppose, the underpinning concept is that that makes all good fiction good, and that which turns good fiction into GREAT fiction is that certain, ethereal ability of an author to turn the implausable into the identifiable. Cornwell manages this so well in this book that you do not even notice it is happening. The book is about, primarily, a stone age/iron age boy, named Saban, and his trials and tribulations in life, in love and in battle, in an era long before there are any remaining records. It is a marvel ...  Read the complete review