Synopsis:Nothing at all to do with this year’s ludicrous – and yet entertaining – travesty of the Robin Hood legend on BBCTV, this version is a darker and more serious affair. It finds the famous outlaw hero metamorphosed into a dispossessed Welsh prince fighting for the freedom of his country against the Norman oppressors.

Review: The first factor to note here is that Hood is the opening book in a projected sequence of novels called King Raven. If, therefore, you are expecting all of the traditional episodes from the hoary old tales of the Merry Men in Lincoln Green, then you may be disappointed. Neither is this variation on a theme aimed at a specifically young readership – Lawhead has much more adult and unorthodox intentions.

Old faces do, however, reappear in more or less familiar guises: for instance, Little John, Friar Tuck, Lady Marian, Guy of Gisbourne, the evil Abbot, and the Sheriff of Nottingham who is represented by a combination of one overtly and another covertly nasty Norman lords. Good old Robin of Loxley is transformed into Bran ap Brychan, reluctant hero of the Welsh woods and valleys.

Lawhead’s main reason for taking liberties with the legend certainly has a ring of credibility in that he asserts that Welsh warriors were the acknowledged masters of the longbow and that the border forest of Coed Cadw would have provided a more effective refuge than Sherwood.

The writer’s knowledge of medieval agriculture, building and politics is at once a strength and a weakness of his novel, providing realistic background detail but also producing some longwinded passages of exposition and rather stilted dialogue. Despite some exciting outbreaks of mayhem, the narrative is somewhat slow and stalls altogether in a middle section where, deep in the forest, a wounded Bran is healed by a white witch who convinces him of his mystical destiny via a series of herbally induced revelations.

The tale does, however, pick up pace following this longeur and, by the end, I was quite looking forward to the next instalment. Younger readers who are not sword and sorcery fans are likely to find Hood hard going, though and, at 432 pages, it certainly is not in the frame as a class-reader. Recommend it to the top-end instead.

2006-11-21