Denis Butler

This book was published as part of the general increase of interest in the Norman Conquest as its 900th anniversary approached. It's not a scholarly book, though, it's a popular history, a book meant to appeal to the mass audience, though based on the soundest scholarship available at that time.

It's a successful attempt to make distant events and people come to life, in that Butler gives not simply dates and events and a list of the players on the stage. He makes it his business to extrapolate, from the scanty source materials that survive, the likeliest feelings of the actors on the stage of history, and sifts through the detritus that inevitably accretes around the great and good after their deaths to get at the most probable motives and processes of thought behind their recorded actions.

Butler himself was a television and short story writer, this being his first major prose work. It shows in certain craft areas. He tends to shift his focus from place to place in his narrative without offering much sense of *why* he is doing so. He chose a chronological approach to telling the story of the year, which makes perfect sense; but his leaps of PoV among the many active parties aren't tied as well as they could be to that chronological structure. Given that there is little known with certainty about the timing of events at this late remove, it could not have hurt his credibility to acknowledge that his timings are not specific but probable more often than he does.

All that said, I can but pine wistfully for the times when history books such as this were popular reading. The modern trend in non-ficiton towards the narrow subject and the biography and the relevance of a specific event instead of an overview at book length of a pivotal time is, in my opinion, a loss. Books like "1831", dedicated to as broad an assemblage of facts and theories about a single year and its consequences for modern times, are all too rare; I can think of few others, "1759" being one, "1688" being another. Both, by the bye, are excellent books. They failed to set the sales charts on fire, sadly. Decent sales, enough to make their publishers issue paper editions; but not world-beaters, the way this book was in its day.

Interests have changed, it's true, and the specific subject as opposed to the general one is ever more evidently the winner of the consumer dollar sweepstakes. It's not a bad thing, really, but a worrisome one if it betokens further and accelerating fragmentation of knowledge. It's good to know all there is to know about "The Texas City Disaster" but mostly because its knock-on effects on corporate power are still being felt. It's not good that no one is writing about the underlying causes of these disasters...perhaps if someone had, it could have prevented Bhopal from happening for most of the same causes as Texas City did.

Ah well, such are the cranks and crotchets of an aging liberal with an autodidact's inability to see why education should prove so stultifying to human curiosity. I recommend this book to those with an interest in history, those who like to feel they have a better broad understanding of it, and those whose non-professional interest in the past is naggingly unfilfilled by current works of historical scholarship.… (mehr)