Frontier Wolf by Rosemary Sutcliff
Jan. 6th, 2020 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeMy first book of 2020, and a very good choice to start the new year! This is another entry in the Dolphin Ring sequence that began with The Eagle of the Ninth—I think it's the third chronologically but was written quite a bit later (it's not a closely linked series, so it doesn't matter very much).
It's been a while since I'd read any Sutcliff books, and I think I'd forgotten just quite how good a writer she is. Seriously, it's all here: really gorgeous descriptions of nature and the landscape, a sense of place and time so vivid you can practically feel the brisk northern wind blowing on your face as you read, horribly well-structured and compelling plots, brilliantly-drawn characters and, of course, beautiful and heartbreaking relationships.
A little bit about the book: it's set in Roman Britain in the reign of Constans (so 340s-ish, I think—my knowledge of the relevant history is very hazy). The main character, Alexios, is an army officer who reached a position of command too young thanks to his family privilege and ended up making a horrible error of judgement. As punishment, he gets sent off to the very edge of the Roman Empire in what's now Scotland, to command the Frontier Wolves—the decidedly irregular and idiosyncratic body of soldiers who are responsible for patrolling and defending the frontier. Despite a difficult start, Alexios slowly gains the trust of his men (with a little help from a very cute kitten), and becomes close with Cunorix, the proud and honourable heir to the chieftainship of a local friendly Celtic tribe. It's all looking up for him...
...and then everything goes spectacularly wrong.
It's a sort of domino chain of wrongness, which begins with an ignorant and insensitive senior official visiting Alexios's fort and ends with the Frontier Wolves having lost the friendship of their Celtic allies, realising after being attacked by those former allies along with several other, newly arrived hostile tribes that their situation is hopeless, and being forced to retreat back southwards with Cunorix's people and various other enemies in close pursuit.
This later part of the book is very gripping and memorable, but what really makes it is the terrible, terribledelicious angst and pain emotion of the whole situation. Alexios and Cunorix's arc from wary allies to friends to enemies is great and heartbreaking—there's a beautiful scene right towards the end where they meet again and all the echoes of their past love for each other are still there even as they address each other as enemies who must destroy each other or die trying...
(so yeah, I have a new OTP :D I have such fantastic taste in ships, really)
Alexios's relationship with the Frontier Wolves, and especially with his second-in-command Hilarion, is also wonderful. The slow, subtle development of trust and loyalty between them in the early part of the book is beautifully portrayed, and what the Wolves are reported to have said about Alexios right at the end confirms it all perfectly. Alexios learns to grow past his earlier huge mistake and becomes worthy of his rank; later on there's a gut-wrenching moment where he has to make a choice that's a direct parallel of that mistake, except this time he knows it's the right choice, and his men are with him in it. Hilarion is an intriguing character—I wasn't sure what to make of him at first, being quite mysterious and keeping his real thoughts and feelings carefully hidden, but by the end of the book it's very clear how he feels about Alexios.
Frontier Wolf is the most fandom-popular of Sutcliff's books after The Eagle of the Ninth, so there'll be lots of fic to dig into when my emotions about the canon have calmed down. I had managed to osmose—and the AO3 numbers confirm—that Alexios/Hilarion is the most popular ship, and I can see why, but I still feel more strongly about Alexios/Cunorix (for which there are fourteen whole fics! Such riches, after my last OTP with six... :D)
Anyway—this is a very, very good book, one you should definitely read and one that will probably become a long-term fave of mine. <3
It's been a while since I'd read any Sutcliff books, and I think I'd forgotten just quite how good a writer she is. Seriously, it's all here: really gorgeous descriptions of nature and the landscape, a sense of place and time so vivid you can practically feel the brisk northern wind blowing on your face as you read, horribly well-structured and compelling plots, brilliantly-drawn characters and, of course, beautiful and heartbreaking relationships.
A little bit about the book: it's set in Roman Britain in the reign of Constans (so 340s-ish, I think—my knowledge of the relevant history is very hazy). The main character, Alexios, is an army officer who reached a position of command too young thanks to his family privilege and ended up making a horrible error of judgement. As punishment, he gets sent off to the very edge of the Roman Empire in what's now Scotland, to command the Frontier Wolves—the decidedly irregular and idiosyncratic body of soldiers who are responsible for patrolling and defending the frontier. Despite a difficult start, Alexios slowly gains the trust of his men (with a little help from a very cute kitten), and becomes close with Cunorix, the proud and honourable heir to the chieftainship of a local friendly Celtic tribe. It's all looking up for him...
...and then everything goes spectacularly wrong.
It's a sort of domino chain of wrongness, which begins with an ignorant and insensitive senior official visiting Alexios's fort and ends with the Frontier Wolves having lost the friendship of their Celtic allies, realising after being attacked by those former allies along with several other, newly arrived hostile tribes that their situation is hopeless, and being forced to retreat back southwards with Cunorix's people and various other enemies in close pursuit.
This later part of the book is very gripping and memorable, but what really makes it is the terrible, terrible
(so yeah, I have a new OTP :D I have such fantastic taste in ships, really)
Alexios's relationship with the Frontier Wolves, and especially with his second-in-command Hilarion, is also wonderful. The slow, subtle development of trust and loyalty between them in the early part of the book is beautifully portrayed, and what the Wolves are reported to have said about Alexios right at the end confirms it all perfectly. Alexios learns to grow past his earlier huge mistake and becomes worthy of his rank; later on there's a gut-wrenching moment where he has to make a choice that's a direct parallel of that mistake, except this time he knows it's the right choice, and his men are with him in it. Hilarion is an intriguing character—I wasn't sure what to make of him at first, being quite mysterious and keeping his real thoughts and feelings carefully hidden, but by the end of the book it's very clear how he feels about Alexios.
Frontier Wolf is the most fandom-popular of Sutcliff's books after The Eagle of the Ninth, so there'll be lots of fic to dig into when my emotions about the canon have calmed down. I had managed to osmose—and the AO3 numbers confirm—that Alexios/Hilarion is the most popular ship, and I can see why, but I still feel more strongly about Alexios/Cunorix (for which there are fourteen whole fics! Such riches, after my last OTP with six... :D)
Anyway—this is a very, very good book, one you should definitely read and one that will probably become a long-term fave of mine. <3
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Date: Jan. 6th, 2020 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Jan. 6th, 2020 08:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Jan. 6th, 2020 08:37 pm (UTC)(and I'm going to mention *yet* another exchange: did you know there's one for Sutcliff's books?)
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Date: Jan. 7th, 2020 05:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Jan. 6th, 2020 09:18 pm (UTC)ibut I still feel more strongly about Alexios/Cunorix (for which there are fourteen whole fics! Such riches, after my last OTP with six... :D)
Um, well, I think on balance there is actually more Keith/Ewen fic than there is Alexios/Cunorix fic. Like, a lot of those are really short or are endgame Alexios/Hilarion. Just so you don't get your hopes up!
There was also a surprisingly good recent fic with Alexios/Julius Gavros (the commander who was there before him). I would never have thought of that pairing (of course there's an age difference) but it really convinced me.
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Date: Jan. 7th, 2020 05:41 pm (UTC)Mmm, having had more of a read through the tag it does look like that (endgame Alexios/Hilarion is fine, that's basically what I see happening in canon—but you do want fic just about your own OTP too, you know? :P) Ah well, just have to write my own!
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Date: Jan. 15th, 2020 06:30 am (UTC)I was surprised at how long the march out took, too. He did well, and Hilarion supported him nobly. I actually gasped when they came to the fort (can't remember its name) and found it was abandoned, despite all I learned about storytelling techniques n the intervening years.
Rosemary Sutcliff, storyteller extraordinaire.
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Date: Jan. 15th, 2020 05:57 pm (UTC)And yeah, that whole part of the book was a pretty nerve-wracking experience—but a very, very well-written one. I actually gasped when they came to the fort (can't remember its name) and found it was abandoned Yep, me too! :D