THE FIREDRAKE (Fire Drake)

by Cecelia Holland

Book Overview

Cecelia Hollands first novel follows the career of an Irish mercenary knight who joins the army of William the Conqueror and fights at the Battle of Hastings. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• ISBN: 0345030516
• ISBN13: 9780345030511
• Release Date: January 1973
• Publisher: Ballantine
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

HISTORICAL FICTION AT IT'S BEST

A very unique book, particularly a book for a first time author (at the time - this was her first). I love this author's syntax. You will find little of the blah, blah, blah which plague many historical fiction works. I first read this one in 1979 an have been a fan ever since. The book was well researched and the story flows well. Recommend it highly.

The first by one of the best

As any regular reader of my reviews knows, I'm a great fan of Cecelia Holland's historical novels. This is her very first, written as an undergrad and published just as she was starting graduate work at Columbia and working at Downtown Brentano's. I was also in grad school and I read it avidly the same year. She chose for her first excursion one of the key events in Western European history (and therefore in our own history on this side of the Atlantic): The last phase of the rise of William of Normandy as a charismatic figure of major influence and the decisive day of battle near Hastings that completely changed the course of everything having to do with England. But that's only the final few chapters. We start with the journey of Laeghaire (pronounced "Lear") of the Long Road, an Irish knight with Viking ancestors (making him kin to William himself), a berserker fighter who builds a reputation to silence those beside whom he fights. Laeghaire has fought for pay all over Europe for nine years and now, fleeing the vengeance of a stingy Thuringian lord, he heads back to the court of the Count of Flanders, Duke William's father-in-law. He leads the Flemish contingent in the Norman conquest of Maine, where he comes to William's notice in both good and bad ways. The Irishman is touchy of his honor and reputation, a free knight who doesn't take orders easily, an intelligent and literate man with a gift for languages who is uncommonly useful to his employer. He acquires a woman, and a son, and begins to care about someone other than himself, until Hastings comes and reorders his life yet again. Laeghaire would not be an easy man to be around, but he's certainly a man you would want to be sure was on your side. All the elements of Holland's very personal approach to medieval military history are here -- the lesser figure as viewpoint who mixes with the great and powerful, the use of vivid colloquial English so carefully crafted you'll think you're eavesdropping on the original vernacular, the spare prose that doesn't describe every tree and field but that points up the occasional crucial detail as a key to mood and character. The author also relies on short, simple declarative sentences -- a style which was somewhat overdone in this first book but which was modified in her subsequent work. With all the reading I do of new releases, I manage always to salt my list with re-reads of Holland's best half-dozen novels every few years, as a matter of balance.

A Symbolic Comet

This is Cecelia Holland's first novel, maybe her best, and the first book of hers that I read, and it made me an instant fan of Ms Holland. It is now a classic of historical fiction. Her prose is economical, which may be almost unique among historical fiction writers who tend to be windy. This spare writing style lets the reader's imagination engage more fully. She has a knack for making horses seem incredibly true in her books, possibly from having been raised on a ranch or farm, this being a good artifice for making her fiction seem more real in eras when horses were commonplace in people's lives. One reviewer complained of a lack of conflict in THE FIREDRAKE. One wonders what type of conflict they want. Surely the Norman invasion of England was more than a dart-throwing contest at your corner pub. Our protagonist in THE FIREDRAKE, the knight-mercenary Laeghaire, alone in a world of chaos and anarchy in a time when most such men were bound to a leige lord seems another major issue of conflict: one man against the world. Don't we all feel like that sometimes? Of course, William the Bastard seeks to make Laeghaire his own man, another point of contention. I see Laeghaire as the Modern Man born in the wrong century. Myself, I rooted for Harold Godwinson and his grim shield wall on Senlac Ridge in the climatic battle scene of the book, but then I've always tended to support an honorable underdog. The firedrake was a comet and THE FIREDRAKE is a symbolic comet, announcing Ms Holland's arrival as argueably our foremost writer of historical fiction.

A Remarkable Feat

This was Cecelia Holland's first book, published just after she finished college. As the first work of an extraordinary and very young writer, The Firedrake is a remarkable feat, all the more so for having been written in the days when historical fiction was inevitably plodding, overly-detailed, full of unreal characters and endless, pointless descriptions, and way too long. Ms. Holland's cold and brutal spareness of language, her unblinking depictions of life as it had to have been lived by actual people, her fully-realized men and women, blew a bright, cold blast of reality onto the dull, smoking coals of historical fiction (sorry! couldn't resist such a terrible metaphor!), and the genre has never been the same. For lovers of historical fiction who have grown up since the 60's, you have, first and foremost, Cecelia Holland to thank for an incredible transformation that MADE the genre you love...If you're not sure you believe me, try reading Mary Renault!The Firedrake is not a perfect book. It was and still is, however, a strikingly original one, and one well worth the time spent to read and appreciate it. It gets 5 stars with pleasure, not for perfection but for its astonishing originality.

What historical fiction should be

Cecelia Holland's unusually spare voice gives freshness and literary distinction to a genre often overwhelmed with schmaltz. This story of medieval Europe is cold, violent and unromantic, but never fails to grip the reader.