Supposedly narrated by the scholar and Aristotelian Michael Scott to his pupil the future Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, sometime in the early 13th century, Charlemagne and Roland completes the trilogy begun by The Evening of the World and Arthur the King. Although framed as a picturesquely tongue-in-cheek accompaniment to a great deal of Carolingian history, it also doubles up — and far more amusingly — as a highly sophisticated commentary on the whole idea of how one sets about writing an historical novel.
The battlefield on which most purists of the genre take their stand lies on the plain of idiom. All very well cramming in casket-loads of period detail, they stoutly cry — already, you see, I am sounding like Allan Massie — but what is the point if you can’t get vernacular and mindset right; that is, encumber your characters with no observations and attitudes beyond those that could be plausibly associated with their real-life equivalents? Booker Prize-winners have faltered at this gargantuan hurdle, but Massie gets round the problem by pretending that it doesn’t exist, or rather by helping himself to any particular vocal style that he thinks appropriate to the task in hand.
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