The Sheriff of Nottingham - Softcover

Kluger, Richard

3.51

103 ratings by Goodreads

9780140177039: The Sheriff of Nottingham

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140177035 ISBN 13: 9780140177039

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1993

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Has there ever been a less lovable character in folk literature than that craven creature, the nameless Sheriff of Nottingham?

He remains to this day, fed by Hollywood versions of the legend, the hateful, impotent foil to that celebrated bowman, Robin Hood. Now, with his novel, The Sheriff of Nottingham, Richard Kluger turns the timeless tale on its head in a vivid,compassionate narrative based upon authentic and quite startling history.

Through a fusion of art and documented fact, Kluger portrays a far different sheriff. Philip Mark, a soldier of fortune from Touraine in the heart of France and actually cited by name in the text of the Magna Carta as objectionable to the king's barons, is a complex figure, a man with a heart, a conscience, and deft political instincts. Posted to Nottinghamshire in 1208 as the crown's chief law officer, he is answerable only to King John himself, a monarch who has been handed down to posterity - perhaps not altogether fairly - as an unredeemed tyrant presiding over a tumultuous age.

In vital, dramatic colors, Kluger paints a panorama of that England at the dawn of modernity and its principal players and events. Here are dark intrigue and adroit statecraft, hand-to-hand combat and sharp wits in collision, an avaricious ruler attempting to seduce his sheriff's wife on Christmas night, and the hatching of the Magna Carta itself at Nottingham Castleone fine September eve in 1213 (along with the reasons why Philip Mark is specifically mentioned in that immortal document).

Storytelling at its most gripping comes in the novel's powerfully moving centerpiece. Thirty sons of Welsh warlords are consigned to Philip's castle as royal hostages on the orders of the king to ensure that their volatile fathers behave themselves back in chronically rebellious Wales. The boys are treated with respect and kindness by the sheriff and his family until a year later when King John thunders into the castle courtyard at the head of his entourage and, in a fury over a new Welsh uprising, roars at Philip, "Hang the hostages - hang them all - and at once!" How Sheriff Mark responds to this grim command forms the moral core of the novel.

In The Sheriff of Nottingham, Kluger has woven an engrossing medieval tapestry that transports the reader beyond the mists of time and legend to witness the struggle of a singular character seeking to act honorably in a time ruled by savage impulse and civil uproar.

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About the Author:

Richard Kluger is an American author who, after working as a New Yorkjournalist and publishing executive, turned in mid-career to writingwidely lauded books on U.S. social history. His two best known worksare Simple Justice, generally regarded as thedefinitive account of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 landmark decisionoutlawing racially segregated public schools, and Ashes to Ashes, a critical history of the cigarette industry and its lethal toll on the public's health, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1997.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Taking full advantage of the poetic license that fiction affords, award-winning social-historian Kluger returns with a sixth novel (Un-American Activities, 1982, etc.), painting the popular legend of Robin Hood and his nemesis in an intriguing, entirely different light. Sheriff Philip Mark shines forth from the outset as a veritable paragon of virtue, arriving at Nottingham Castle in 1208 with his family to take up his position as a reward for battlefield service rendered to King John in France. In contrast to the pilferers and scoundrels who preceded him, and in spite of the inclinations of nearly all who serve him, Philip quickly establishes his tenure as a model of propriety and decency, in which his loyalty to the King can never be doubted. Aided primarily by Sparks, his faithful, keen-witted adviser whom he raises from castle obscurity, and his eminently practical wife Anne, who advances his cause in her own way--satisfying her needs in the bargain--the Sheriff gains general respect and no small amount of enmity from those over whom he gains the upper hand. His oath of obedience is sorely tried at times, never more than when called upon by his enraged King to hang a group of well-born Welsh lads held hostage in the castle, but he remains true to the end, hoping for but never receiving knighthood as his just due. In his tenacious struggle to retain honor and dignity the Merry Men in Sherwood Forest play a minor, largely comic role, while the broader historical pageant involving the King, the Church, and conditions leading to the Magna Carta receives full consideration. Vivid though the pageantry is, the Sheriff himself is too noble for his own good; his ethics prove predictable and tedious, and spoil an otherwise impressive saga. -- Copyright �1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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