This is not a nice book. This is not a tale of King Arthur of which Disney would approve. It's not romantic, glossy, subtle, or sanitized. There are no chivalrous knights, the kind which spring from the pages of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table. There are no lessons of magical shape-shifting as in T.H. White's The Once and Future King. And there are certainly no rites celebrating the strength of female divinity as portrayed in Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon.

This is a down-and-dirty book. It's brutish, thuggish, full of crude men, cruel battles, harsh realities and bleak futures. Set in the dawn of the Dark Ages, the days when Rome has been crushed, its influences eclipsed and all traces of Roman law and infrastructure are being savagely snuffed out by the sweeping hordes of Vandals and Visigoths, Saxons and Franks, The Winter King is a tale of a time when life is short and one's value is determined, if you're a man, by the strength of your sword arm and, if you're a women, by the power and wealth behind your father's name. It is a story of the one man devoted to peace in this time of chaos. Arthur, some say king of Britain, some say warlord, a man of myth and legend who manages to come to new life between the pages of Cornwell's novel.

Yet, despite the barbaric nature of the story which unfolds in The Winter King, there's nothing gratuitous about it. The opposite, in fact. Everything, from the death of a soldier to the rape of a captive woman to the sacrifice of a prisoner of war is carried out in the most casual, matter-of-fact manner, a method of storytelling which only enhances the tale's sense of realism, giving the narrative a level of depth and gravity missing from many books which glorify the spilling of blood and go into almost gleeful detail whenever degradation or humiliation occur. In this manner, Cornwell accurately and vividly paints a portrait of a land in turmoil, where all traces of Rome's colonization are slowly being eroded, pillaged, buried and forgotten. A land under constant threat from marauders without and treachery within, where your ally today can become your enemy tomorrow for the right amount of gold. A land convulsed by religious dissent just as much as it was by invasion and politics, its Old Gods fighting for supremacy with the new god of the White Christ, pagan against Christian, magic against piety.

Though Cornwell is a talented tale-weaver, there are a couple of nitpicks I have with the book. First off, he tends to repeat himself, giving a description of someone or something only to repeat it a couple of paragraphs later. Now, if the repetition occurred at a greater distance, with the vast and often complex array of place-names, characters and descriptions, that reminder of who rules where and invaded or conspired with which tribe can be a much needed aid. However, even I, the most addlepated of blondes, can remember information long enough not to need a refresher of said information three paragraphs later. Second, the spitting. Everyone. Spits. A lot. Whenever I put the book down for a break, I felt as though I needed to take a bath from all the flying phlegm. Now I'm sure all the spitting, to ward off evil, to seal a curse, to call on lucky spirits, to show disdain, is historically accurate or at least appropriate, but after a while it was just plain gross and distracting. Hell, I would've settled for a few bouts of pissing or defecation in place of the spitting, just to break the mucus monotony.

However, despite those little quirks, which did tend to ease up towards the end of the book, this was a well-written, fast-paced, compellingly-told story. The battle scenes were written in an almost terse manner, revealing the carnage and destruction wrought without reveling in it. The dialogue never felt stilted or awkward, which can sometimes occur in the best of adventure novels, making character interactions feel real and absolutely human. And Cornwell has a deft hand at piecing together the often disparate Roman and Ancient British place names with the even more prehistoric monuments and landscape features, giving the reader an almost tangible sense of that isle's immense history. As much as I've enjoyed reading other interpretations of Arthurian history, those with a feminist slant, those with a more modern, Americanized, "democracy for all" slant, Cornwell's novel is the one which feels as though it were the actual truth, a factual account of this shadowy period of history which somehow became lost to time.