Stonehenge: 2000 B.C.

I've never found a Cornwell book boring before, and to be fair, I didn't find this one totally boring either. I just looked down at the time remaining and was aghast to realize there were six more hours of this novel left when so many years had passed and so much had already happened. I want to come back to it some day, but that feels a little doubtful considering I had difficulty telling the characters apart. This has never happened to me with a Cornwell novel before, but the guy's bound to disappoint me sooner or later.

I think a great deal of my fatigue with the book is how much of it feels like a retread of the Warlord Chronicles and The Last Kingdom series. Any novelist who has as large a bibliography as Cornwell will have stock characters and repeated tropes, but in this case, it meant I knew the trajectory of characters before we got there, making the incredibly leisurely pace feel even more sluggish. There just wasn't much suspense, if you are familiar with the way Cornwell likes to write various characters.

I think the novel has an interesting tension in the writing, if not the text. Cornwell is a historical novelist, but there just isn't much extant detail remaining from the British Isles 2000 BCE. It means that Cornwell has more room to fall back on his favored themes. However, this book is about building Stonehenge, something that was probably a religious monument, during a time when there really was no outlet for atheism. Thus Cornwell has to worldbuild a great deal of what the religion of that time even was, and... it's just not something that interests him, if the text is any indication. He is interested in exploring historical detail, and there just isn't enough to give the novel the texture and weight his novels usually have.

I don't regret reading this– listening to Jonathan Keeble is always a pleasures– but I'm fine with putting it down. I may reread the Warlord Chronicles, though, for a better and more satisfying version of this book.

This one reminded me of Cornwell's Saxon Chronicles combined with Pillars of the Earth. Great read.