The Archer’s Tale

Set during the Hundred Years War, The Archer’s Tale, the first book in the Grail Quest trilogy, is much more concerned with describing the great battles of the time than with telling a proper story, whose main plot is so uninteresting that it gets ignored even by its own characters.

Thomas, the protagonist, is the son of a priest in the village of Hookton in England. While his father makes plans for him to become a scholar, the boy just wants to train with his longbow and hook up with new and beautiful women: the only moments in his life when he feels truly fulfilled. On a fateful day, however, Hookton is sacked by a band of French mercenaries, commanded by the mysterious and vile Harlequin, and the relic of his father’s church, the spear that St. George himself used to kill the dragon, is stolen. The archer, then, vows before his father’s body to retrieve the spear and decides to join the English army, glimpsing a chance to fight against the French and find his nemesis.

In the first chapter already, however, Thomas has seemingly forgotten everything about the spear, finding himself in the midst of brutal sieges and impressive battles, such as the one in Crecy, and is clearly so interested in gaining fame and glory  – which is easily perceived by his insistence on being always the one who will devise the strategy to defeat the rival army – that he only remembers his promise to his dead father when it is thrown directly at his face by the forced coincidences of the plot. Passages in the vein of “Oh, yeah, there was that spear, I remember” are alarmingly constant. Even minor characters like Hobb and Guillaume have to basically make the protagonist remember the title of his trilogy of novels.

Thomas is an archer and, because of that, a valuable member of the English army. The longbow’s capacity to slaughter half of a battalion before it could even approach its enemy was one of the crucial factors in making England the most fearsome force in Europe in the early fourteenth century. Therefore, knowing how much he is worth to the army and feeling satisfied while fighting for it, Thomas cannot glimpse what he could gain by abandoning his life in search of a spear that legends, in which he clearly doesn’t believe, say to be sacred.

Nevertheless, the plot surrounding the Hundred Years’ War, even though being shallow, is better than the search for the Grail, having even its own antagonist: the poor knight Sir Simon Jekyll, who is in search of fortune and ends up creating a personal quarrel with the archer. Simon’s character is much better developed than that of Harlequin – whom Bernard Cornwell simply describes as someone who always keeps his cool and tone of voice steady – and, throughout the novel, we may even come to sympathize with him a little – just a little, just a tiny bit –, as his motivations (fame and fortune) are much more understandable than those of the other main villain, who remains an empty mystery.

Most of the characters in The Archer’s Tale, however, follow the characterization of Harlequin and not of Sir Simon, being shallow stereotypes or considerably tiresome. Thomas, for example, is tall, handsome, and deadly. He likes women and murder, and he’s all out of women. He doesn’t seem to be a person consumed by a desire for revenge and lacks any interesting aspirations to make up for his lack of an interesting personality. For him, it’s enough to just join the army, prove himself crucial to its success, and then later going to bed with a woman. I mean, I don’t judge him, but he’s not exactly riveting as a protagonist.

The character of Joanette also suffers from the narrative sometimes confusing complexity with inconsistency: during the siege of La Roche-Derrien, Joanette is presented as an enemy warrior famous for possessing excellent aim and a fierce personality, even being called Blackbird by those around her. However, after the city is besieged, she is portrayed as a fragile, whiny, silly, and irritating woman, who doesn’t even try to defend herself against injustice. The character’s identity at the beginning, Blackbird, is completely opposite to the woman who accompanies Thomas for the rest of the novel, and she never again presents the rough and violent traces that were seen in La Roche-Derrien. Conflicting elements can often help build complex characters, but in her case, they are so absurd and disparate that they could never belong to the same individual and are just disappointing.

If its series were called “The Hundred Years War Chronicles” and the annoying Grail story were completely dropped, The Archer’s Tale wouldn’t have been a much better book but, at least, it would have certainly been a more honest one.

January 28, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on March 11, 2015.