There is a wonderful sense of the Scottish landscape, some nail-biting escapes and
chases, and even a hint of romance (I was terribly in love with Cottia when I was
nine.) I can't imagine why it's never been turned into a movie, but perhaps no movie
could compete with the one which unfolds inside the reader's imagination, prompted
by Rosemary Sutcliff's vivid descriptions.
Warrior Scarlet is a quieter sort of book, and I seem to recall making several false
starts before I finally got into it, but I suspect it may be even better than The
Eagle.... It's the story of Drem, a boy growing up in a bronze-age settlement on
the South Downs. Born with a withered right arm, he imagines that he will never
be able to become one of the hunters of the tribe and win the right to wear the scarlet
cloak of a warrior. The book follows him as he grows to manhood, and learns to overcome
his handicap.
Like Marcus's crippled leg in The Eagle of the Ninth, it is easy to see Drem's useless
arm as a reflection of Rosemary Sutcliff's own disability (she spent her childhood
and much of her adult life in great pain with a form of rheumatism). It's hard to
imagine that she ever walked very far, and certainly not into the sorts of wild and
remote landscapes which she writes about, yet she describes them as well as any writer
I can think of. It's a triumph of the imagination; the same imagination which she
uses to think herself into the mind of a young Roman officer or a bronze-age shepherd
boy. A few of the historical details in her books may have been cast into doubt
by new evidence which has emerged since they were written (for instance, most historians
now accept that the 9th Legion wasn't wiped out in Scotland at all but simply transferred
to a new posting elsewhere in the empire) but the emotions still ring true, and the
stories are still gripping, and they still bring the past to life.
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
When I was eleven or twelve I assumed that The Lord of the Rings was simply the best
book there was. Nowadays I have some serious doubts about it. Let's face it, it's
about a fantasy race-war in which a lot of Aryan supermen slaughter hordes of dark-skinned,
slanty-eyed, scimitar-wielding sub-humans from the East. But the hobbits help to
soften it a little, and the landscapes and the language still appeal. Oddly enough,
my favourite bits are the strange detours and diversions which quite understandably
didn't make it into Peter Jackson's movies: the old forest, Tom Bombadil, the Barrow
Downs. And I love the odd, extended ending, where the hobbits come home to the Shire
to discover that evil isn't really some far-off thing that can be defeated by armies
and chucking rings down volcanoes; it can happen wherever ordinary people are greedy
and their leaders are hungry for power.
The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander
Lloyd Alexander takes all the action and adventure of The Lord of the Rings and packs
it into five fast-moving 200 page children's novels, The Book of Three, The Black
Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer and The High King. Taran the Assistant
Pig-Keeper is sent off on various quests in a fantasy world vaguely based on Celtic
legends.
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