Mr Cornwell:
While waiting for Uhtred to get home (it’s going to be his son who does the trick, right?), and for Starbuck to find out who he, himself, is, I thought back to a famous historical novelist of the 1950’s and ‘60’s, Frank Yerby. I detect in your writing a spirited distaste for the Christianity of the 9th and early 10th Century. (It would be dangerous to speculate on your feelings about 20th – 21st Century Christianity.) With that in mind, I enthusiastically recommend Yerby’s Judas My Brother, a historical novel set in the time of Jesus’ life.
Yerby did research that beggars superlatives, and, also, seems to have learned Greek, Latin and several Semitic dialects of the period. He completely disassembles all the New Testament stories and reveals them, virtually all, to be myths. He does it with some vinegary disdain as well.
While reading three of Yerby’s excellent novels Goat Song, The Saracen Blade and the aforementioned Judas My Brother, I noticed that his heroes either found themselves aliens (in the traditional sense) in a different culture or straddling different cultures. All are gifted polyglots with mastery of various, very differing languages, just as your heroes are. Then I thought back to Gary Jennings who also had many straddling heroes, one of whom even straddled genders. Also in James Clavell’s Shogun the hero straddles two cultures, and, in David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, the hero straddles Dutch and Japanese cultures. Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. There must be a plethora of other instances.
Finally, there is a coming-of-age story, probably the very first one, from Egypt around 1900 BCE. It is the story of Sinuhe, a very young man in the Egyptian army. When the Pharaoh of the time dies, Sinuhe, suffers unfounded fears that he may be persecuted or even killed. He takes off and wanders around the Near East, that is, among the many cultures surrounding the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. He matures (the Bildungsroman essence of the story); becomes very adept at navigating all the different cultures, and comes home in, not so much in triumph, as in political and commercial acumen. In 1945, the Finn, Mika Waltari, fleshed the story out very nicely in The Egyptian; it was subsequently made into a film in 1954. Anyway, straddling in 1900 BCE. Later he does the same with The Etruscan
It can’t be called a literary convention but it is an exceptionally fruitful device.
Conrad Planas