Viking: King’s Man

Last week I finished reading the third and final book in Tim Severin’s Viking series – “King’s Man”. Tim Severin is best known as an explorer/writer/broadcaster who has re-created a number of famous voyages and journeys from history, but a few years ago he decided to enter the “historical fiction” market and wrote the first of his Viking series. Being a regular reader of other books in this genre (particularly those by Bernard Cornwell) I came across Viking 1 in a bookshop and since then I have acquired and read all three books in the series. Now, I think it is fair to say (and the fact that I have bought all of these books in discount bookshops provides some support) that Severin is no Cornwell – the books are readable and weave together fiction and real history well enough but they’re not especially well written or gripping. The aspect of the writing that amuses me most is that Severin clearly seems to get bored with writing the detail that accompanies large parts of the plot and every now and again he just decides to move the plot on in one big step. So, we get pages and pages of day-to-day detail and then, quite suddenly, the main character goes off somewhere and in the space of a few sentences a couple of years have passed or his female companion has been killed in a house fire or some such dramatic event occurs.