Warrior Scarlet in Operation Read All the Sutcliff

Sep 16, 2012 Dorothea rated it it was ok

I found the setting to be a difficulty with this book. It's set around 900 BCE, during the Bronze Age in Britain. I know almost nothing about this period, as with many of the periods Sutcliff wrote about, but Sutcliff herself knew less about this one too, because (I believe) there isn't any written record of the Bronze Age people, only information from archaeology. My impression is that Sutcliff learned about the artefacts attributed to these people, and then made up a culture around them, from I found the setting to be a difficulty with this book. It's set around 900 BCE, during the Bronze Age in Britain. I know almost nothing about this period, as with many of the periods Sutcliff wrote about, but Sutcliff herself knew less about this one too, because (I believe) there isn't any written record of the Bronze Age people, only information from archaeology. My impression is that Sutcliff learned about the artefacts attributed to these people, and then made up a culture around them, from personal names to gender and age roles to religion. As a result, I spent much of the book being skeptical about things instead of being absorbed in the story.

For example, although we might think of this time as the Bronze Age, especially characterized by the use of bronze because the British people of that time had learned to make things out of bronze (but not yet out of iron), and because metal artefacts are among the things that survived to teach us about their makers, does it follow that those people would identify themselves with bronze? There's a scene in which a trader displays an iron dagger brought from the continent, which can cut a notch out of a bronze dagger. Everyone's rather frightened by it and the priest makes a mystical speech about how, should iron weapons become widely used, it will be the end of the people. Someone else does sensibly point out that they could be the ones to use iron weapons, but there's very much a sense of the Bronze People beholding their future doom because they are Bronze. To me this seemed artificial, the indulgence of someone who has to think in terms of Flint and Bronze and Iron People because we don't know how these people really knew themselves.

Gender roles are very strict in this book's society. Women sit on that side of the hearth -- men sit on the other! Men mustn't ever help a woman with her work because it's women's work! It's women's job to anticipate when men will need to be fed and pack meals for them! Etc. The protagonist, Drem, is rather gruff and inconsiderate, and he's especially gruff and inconsiderate to girls and women. Sutcliff is completely aware that Drem is sexist and that this is a character flaw that he ought to get over as he gets over his gruff inconsiderateness, but that doesn't really make him any more pleasant to read about. I felt pretty sorry for the unhappy little Potential Love Interest in this story.

I would really have liked Sutcliff's brief Historical Note to explain who the Golden People and the Little Dark People of her story are. Drem is one of the Golden People, who are red-haired or blonde and taller than the Little Dark People, who were there first but now serve the Golden People as shepherds. I liked very much that the only explanation within the story of the two people comes from Doli, one of the Little Dark People, and that Drem does not get to hear all of the secrets of the Little Dark People. But I would have really appreciated knowing how these two peoples fit into today's knowledge of the Bronze Age. At the moment, I'm not even sure that Sutcliff didn't simply make them up.

(Also ... "Little Dark People"? ...)

This story also has the least compelling Intimate Male Friend of the protagonist of all the Sutcliff novels I've read so far. There's nothing objectionable about Vortrix (except his name, maybe), and the turning points of their friendship ought to be interesting, but I just didn't care very much.

My favorite part of Warrior Scarlet was Drem's relationship with his lovely dog (hooray) and the hunter who gave the dog to him, Talore. Drem has a disability -- his right arm doesn't work -- and Talore lost his right hand in battle. So Talore is the person who encourages Drem and shows him that he can become a warrior even without the use of one arm. This made a really nice change from other books I've read where a character with a disability is either the only person with a disability in the entire cast, or there are other characters with completely different disabilities, so that nobody can get any support from someone with the same needs. ...more

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Mar 15, 2014 Sineala rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: e-books, historical-fiction, young-adult, fiction

I know everyone likes this one a lot... but I couldn't really get into it.

This is the tale of Drem, a boy in a Bronze Age British tribe, and his journey into manhood in a culture that expects him to singlehandedly kill a wolf -- the problem in Drem's case is that he literally has a single usable hand to work with.

The novel as a whole has beautiful, lush description -- just the sort of thing Sutcliff's books are good at -- and some dramatic action and numinous rituals and same-sex friendship and ...more

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