Customer Reviews

The Barbarian Princess

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This is the greatest "bodice ripper" romance ever written, the height of genre writing for the field, and criminally neglected. For this work is far beyond the "Saxon sex" yarn of soft-core porn to appeal to the Marge Simpson habitudes of the K-Mart paperback rack. Laura Buchanan (pseudonym of polymath humorist Florence King) deftly constructs a fabulous world and weaves a wonderful story filled with excellent historical detail and famous classical personages. And it is all funny as hell. But Buchanan never breaks character, and so the tale reads on so many multiple levels of excellence of its type, stereotype, and self parody of the genre, that one must read it several times to even begin to appreciate its full dimensions. Highlights include the heroine staying as an unwelcome refuge amidst misogynist Christian ascetics, and the appearance of Hypatia. Hypatia's welcome cameo perhaps is the only unfunny portion of the book, for Buchanan (King) correctly details her horrible death: an historic injustice to knowledge and truth, as well as to the woman Hypatia herself. The work concludes with an allusion to strawberry blonds being the genetic result of a mixture of the Celts and the Saxons, and a ray of hope for the heroine and her hero on the sceptered isle. We know, of course, of the bloody history yet to come. It is sad that we had no further installments from King (Buchanan's) pen, for her own exploration of the romance genre and the history of England would undoubtedly have been delightful. This book is worth searching out and cherishing. By no means should one ever loan it to a friend.

The Barbarian Princess tells the story of a British princess during the Roman empire. She is married to an important Roman noble, falls in love with a Saxon barbarian, and eventually travels around the Mediterranean looking for him and getting herself embroiled in various historical matters such as St. Patrick's abduction by pirates, Alaric's sack of Rome, the Pelagian controversy, the burning of the Alexandrian library...

I'm not really sure what to make of this book. Unlike the other reviewer apparently is, I am not a reader of romance novels, so it is hard for me to judge this book against its genre. I was expecting something funny, although much of it wasn't or the humor was lost on me. Is it a complete parody? Is it the earnest pinnacle of the romance genre? I couldn't say.

Judged on other merits, I found it inconsistent. No one would ever mistake this for the great American novel, but some of the writing is quite good, while at times the writing is no better than the pulp fiction sleaze available at about the same time the novel was published. Starting with a near rape in the first few pages that leaves the protagonist in an unsettled and curious state, the main justification for the book seems to be a sort of sexual Odyssey (like Barbarella, Emmanuelle, or other erotica of roughly the same time period) in which the princess enters into a variety of different sorts of relationships with different sorts of men (and women) in the course of her historical embroilments, finding satisfaction in the end in a life of hearth and home with her one true love. Although some of the situations are ridiculous, some of them seem to be quite serious. In particular, the treatment of the issue of Christianity and paganism seems to have a distinct message. One gets the feeling that this is the author's attempt to lay out her own approach to sexuality and religion. (Also, there's a lot of killing, gore, and destruction, and I'm not sure why.)

In general, I think it is a good policy for men to avoid bodice ripper novels. They are a losing proposition. Is this one any different for being a Florence King book? No, I don't think so. I got some enjoyment out of it for its multitude of Latin sayings and classical references and the occasional misanthropic moment, but in the end it is still a bodice ripper.