The Last English King by Julian Rathbone

I last read this rather enjoyable and playful novel many, many years ago. It's the tale of Walt, one of King Harold's housecarls who is afflicted by both physical and mental wounds after surviving the Battle of Hastings and, evoking The Wanderer, filled with guilt at not having died alongside the ring-giver. It's a novel which balances its humour with real humanity. Walt, like most north European aristocrats, was hardly a cultured man, a kind of proto-John Bull, but he's made likeable by his suffering.

Wandering the Byzantine Empire, as many English refugees were wont to do in the late 1060s, he is accompanied by travelling companions who slowly hear his story, vividly evoking a culture and a lifestyle now suddenly vanished. Yet it's more than this, with the many playful jokes and allusions making this novel a joy to read despite its being about deep loss, subjugation and suffering. We are certainly left in no doubt as to the fate of the common people under Norman rule, but life goes on, and there will always be wine, beauty and laughter.

There is an icky moment involving Walt and a fourteen year old girl, which may be minor in nature but, well, the only acceptable level of ickiness of this sort is zero. That aside, I strongly recommend this wonderful novel from an author who arguably seems, worryingly, to be slowly falling out of fashion.