THE PRETENDER

A lumbering yarn of a once-and-future British king, save that the future never quite materializes.

How you gonna keep him down on the farm after he’s seen Dijon? John Collan, 10 years old when we meet him, is obsessed with ridding his farm hamlet of a devil goat that, he writes, “knocked me in the mud again today & has TRODDEN churlishly over my back.” John also keeps himself busy absorbing the folk wisdom of the simple Saxons among whom he lives, including a cheesemaker with a salty tongue: “A fucking nuisance, she was,” she says of Joan of Arc. “I like to think Banbury cheese had a hand in her downfall.” Well, along comes a mysterious stranger who reveals that John is not who he thinks he is, but instead the tucked-away descendant of a murdered nobleman and, to boot, a claimant to the throne. Trouble is, the other claimants, among them the last of the Plantagenets and the first of the Tudors, have other ideas. John is hauled off to Oxford to learn his Latin and courtly manners and such. There, his kindly patron tells him, “Your real name is Edward, but we can’t use that yet. In letters we’ve coded you Lambert, so we may as well stick at that. You are Lambert Simons.” His education is polished in Burgundy and Ireland, where he finds love and intrigue, per historical fiction formula. Harkin’s tale is slow-moving, with often labored writing that makes for labored reading, and with a kind of half-commitment to using period language: “Sir James Butler has a maugre against the York kings. He picked the Lancastrian side in the great wars, the doddard.” Suffice it to say that at tale’s end, we’re glad to see John/Lambert/Edward sail off for Spain.

A middling entry in the library of medieval English historical fiction.