Customer Reviews

Boudica: The Life of Britain's Legendary Warrior Queen

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I put this `groundbreaking biography of the True Warrior Queen' (if you believe the publishing headline) down thankful I had only borrowed it from a library. The problem with this latest effort to investigate the reality of one of Britain's most famous female leaders is that is it emotionally biased. A fact cheerfully admitted by the author in the introduction where her search for "edgier role models" meant "a warrior queen called Boudicea had a particular resonance with a young impressionable child on the lookout for strong and feisty mentors" (page 6). Alarm bells began to go off as I progressed through the introduction that this was a biography seeking to confirm the heroic fantasy figure myth of Boudica rather than provide a somewhat drier, dispassionate account of one of Britain's most enduring legacies. A quote on the jacket from a periodical stated "The book's principle achievement is the humanizing of a legend". I confess I found it did precisely the opposite.

There is no denying the author's passion for the subject but it proves detrimental in the novel's presentation and factual outlay. You can easily get swept along by Collingridge's excitement as she trots round the halls of academia and various parts of the British landscape but the danger is that the presentation of `facts' become believable when there is in fact no firm foundation. A good example of this comes on page 159 where the author chooses to take the meagre facts of the death of Lindow Man and create some kind of heady ritualistic death scene based on pure fantasy. This kind of emotive scene setting continues throughout, from the opening chapters that skim rather loosely through Roman history till half way through when we get a screenplay description of her final battle. Phrases like: "The clash, when it came, was electric - a fusion of light, sound and white hot energy as the leading soldiers cut a gash through the mass of British warriors, dividing them, annihilating them" (page 242) will make the academic reader pause somewhat.

So, having felt I was sitting through a film rather than a historical biography, it was somewhat better to get to the second half of the work where the author does offer a new set of interesting analysis on Boudica's impact on Britain's cultural history from Milton to Celtomania, Gray and then Queen Victoria and Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, the second part of the work does make it worth reading and anyone with knowledge of Boudica would do well to actually start at chapter 15.

This is a somewhat unique biography in that the passion of the author for the subject is detailed up front and the reader is swept along in a bright-eyed way . Unfortunately, only someone who has studied the period in some detail will recognise the constant stream of `facts' that aren't quite right or aren't fully explored. As such it is a good starter biography for pre-graduate or interested readers but people wishing to delve more deeply into the history of the period and Boudica herself will have to go elsewhere for that drier historical analysis that would be required. I suspect most of my disappointment came from the jacket statements that set an expectation that wasn't met and personal knowledge of the period and the subject meant inconsistency and emotive language was easily spottable, all of which meant the inevitable conclusion that the work confirms the fantastical nature of our perception of Boudica rather than ending up with a quiet respect for the reality of what this legendary warrior queen achieved for her people and subsequent generations.