Customer Reviews

Sir Nigel

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

You're a Sherlock Holmes fan, right? Yes, of course you are. Everybody is. Look at the zillions of reprints of these stories. Every year there's another one. And who is the writer? Why, Arthur Conan Doyle, of course.

Or maybe you're a science-fiction or fantasy nut. The books you love best are those in which a very imaginative author conjures up a remarkable, detailed, complex world, puts human-type characters in it, and sets them in motion, reacting to the forces around them. You'd crawl through mud to find a book like this.

So why oh why oh why don't you give this neglected masterpiece, this Sir Nigel--and with Doyle as the author--the acclaim it so richly deserves? No, it's not fantasy or science-fiction, but it begins in England in 1348, and can you possibly imagine a time and place more foreign than that?

To briefly summarize, the story is about a young squire, Sir Nigel, and his quest to perform noble deeds so that he can win the hand of his love, who waits patiently for him to complete them. If you want nothing more than adventure, this book has it. He begins by rescuing a damsel from a scoundrel who would besmirch her honor; there is a small then a large sea battle against the Spanish; there is a journey to a cruel, pirate-infested island, and the revenge exacted on its leader; there are jousts, one on one and thirty on thirty; and in final there is a large, desperate battle between huge armies of French and English where much glory and blood is to be found. Large and small, adventures abound, and I haven't even mentioned half of them. And nothing here stretches credibility. Yes, Nigel is a hero, but he suffers setbacks also--some really embarrassing--and in fact misses most of a set-piece battle he was looking forward to when he almost gets his brains bashed in at the beginning of it.

Like all of Doyle's creations, this novel is rich in small details also. For example, forks hadn't been invented yet. It was considered good manners to hold your meat with your thumb and middle finger while cutting it; to do otherwise was bad form. When you're done with the meat, you toss the bone behind you for the dogs. Once a week, the whole mess was swept out and more hay is laid on the floor. He shows a great knowledge of weaponry as well, talking about the relative merits of the bow and the arbalest, the heavy stones heaved by mangonels, and of course the use of swords and shields and lance. These are just a couple of examples. Practically every page reveals insights as to the way of life in those times, not the least of which is the portrayal of the chivalraic code by which they all lived.

Lastly, it is beautifully written, almost lyrical. Nigel comes upon the fair Edith, "whose face had come so often betwixt him and his sleep." Is there a more economical or descriptive way to put this? And later, marching in war-torn Brittany: "As the darkness deepened there came in wild gusts the howling of wolves from the forest to remind them that they were in a land of war. So busy had men been for many years in hunting one another that the beasts of the chase had grown to a monstrous degree, until [even] the streets of the town were no longer safe . . ." Descriptive? Indeed, chilling.

This is exciting, informative, first-class fiction, and warrants a much larger audience than it has apprarently been getting over the years. Do your part!

The book just grabbed me from the very first paragraph. I knew that Sir Arthur is an excellent writer but I didn't know that he is that good with medieval adventures.
Everything he writes is very true historically and that makes the book even more enjoyable. His sense of humor and the story made me feel almost being there with Sir Nigel. The story itself is simple but full of surprises. If you are a kid or if you are one of those grown up kids like me you will love this book.

I don't have much time to write this review, but if I did, it would be a long one full of words of praise. I read this book in its Spanish language version(only about 15 times). I found it really exciting and interesting. It is the classic story of the undersized fighter who at the end gets all the glory. The story is full of surprises and it will capture anyone's imagination (it got mine). Read it! -

After finishing The White Company I RAN to the library and devoured the prequal, Sir Nigel.

A magical work of historical fiction.

An absorbing plot of high adventure combines with masterfully-crafted writing to make this book a true classic. From the creator of Sherlock Holmes comes what, in my opinion, is one of the best books ever written.

I fell in love with this book, and The White Company which followed. I am in a Middle Ages Reinactment group, and have been for the past ten years. I feel that Sir Doyle did an extremely detailed research on the period. There was a sense of being with Nigel Loring whilst he struggled to complete his deeds. The book was also true to the brutality, chivalry, and honor which was bestowed upon their fellowm men at the time. Again, a quite fantastic book!!

Gem of a romantic historical adventure, inspiring and fun If the Divine is in the details, than this novel is touched by It with easily readable and rich prose. Read also "The White Company."

I must be losing my taste for things medieval. As a boy I had always enjoyed tales of knights and adventure. Indeed I just about grew up on the stuff. Discovering Arthur Conan Doyle late in life through his Sherlock Holmes tales (I had never been a great fan of detective stories!) thanks to the BBC television series (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Boxed Set Collection))with Jeremy Brett as the inimitable detective, I was fascinated to learn that Conan Doyle was also the author of two historical romances, The White Company and Sir Nigel, both set in the high Middle Ages during the Hundred Years War between England and France -- a war for the territories that would ultimately become the modern state of France. Of course the English nobility and, especially, its royal house traced their descent from the French-speaking Normans and their French allies and so both sides shared a common heritage. Indeed, as Conan Doyle makes clear in one preface to the book, the nobility on both sides spoke French and shared a common set of mores and traditions.

I guess it's those traditions that made the book so tiresome for me though. Certainly it's true that a tradition of chivalrous knight errantry became enshrined in medieval French and English literature, rooted perhaps in the Christian gloss that had been spread by medieval clerics over the old Germanic warrior culture out of which the English and French peoples arose. In such guise, knights are portrayed as forever concerned for honor and their ladies, and when they fight it's not for anything as mundane as power or land or wealth, but for honor and fame, always. This is a strange and distant echo of the old warrior ethos found in works as diverse as the The Iliad (Penguin Classics) or the old Icelandic Njal's Saga (Penguin Classics). In these works, too, honor and fame are admired and portrayed as the underlying forces that prompt men to hazard their lives in trying to take the lives of others on the bloody field of war. But the impulses of acquisition, of ordinary human greed for gain, are not so readily forgotten or dismissed in these as they came to be in the later tradition of European chivalry.

Conan Doyle clearly wrote this tale in that tradition and, as such, he is at great pains to write in a tone and voice that seek to emulate the late medieval uplifting of the warrior's goals to an otherworldly character. Unfortunately it delivers a rather tiresome story about some rather irksome and predictable players. Young Nigel Loring, himself, is the epitome of this. A near penniless squire of an old knightly family fallen on hard times, our hero lives quietly with his grandmother in what remains of his ancient family estate, their household teetering on extinction as a conflict with the local monastery gathers steam, the greedy monks keen to grab the last vestiges of Loring land. Young Nigel, himself, is too noble a fellow to sully himself by trying to outthink the monks. Rather he disregards them as beneath his notice, even as they conspire to yank from under him all that is left of his father's holdings. When a messenger arrives with a king's summons claiming the last of the Lorings' wealth for the Abbey, Nigel, of course, responds without a thought to the game that is (as Holmes might have said, and as one of the knights in this book actually does say at one point) a foot. Instead he boldly boots the fellow out on his rear and sets his servants on him.

As one might imagine, this doesn't go well for him and Nigel is soon hauled before a church court to answer for his actions. But as is always to be the case with our undiscerning hero, luck will out and Nigel shortly finds himself honored by the king who just happens to be passing through. From luck to luck as it were and Nigel is soon inducted into the king's wars abroad in France, learning the arts of nobility first hand from other knights and squires who imagine themselves of better ("gentler") blood than other men. Worshipped by good simple folk who recognize their betters, "worshipfully seeking worship" by crossing his sword and spear with, and trying to kill, other men of "gentle" blood like himself, the stubbornly proud and remarkably dense young Nigel earns himself a suit of armor to go with the magnificent warhorse he had earlier unwittingly gained as he proceeds to follow his king, and a knight who takes him on as squire, to war.

In a series of pieces that take them to Calais and deeper into France, Nigel manages to send back the humble yet spiritual messages he has promised his lady as, one by one, he continues to play his part in the battles and confrontations he finds himself in.

Meanwhile we meet innumerable knights who, like Nigel himself, are introduced via carefully catalogued pedigrees, reports of their knightly colors and insignia and, of course, their manifold remarkable deeds. (Here we find echoes of the Iliad -- though such formal cataloging in an archaic poem has a certain quaintness and interest that is somehow lost in a nineteenth or early twentieth century opus. And yet one can almost see how the echoes of an English classical education worked to inform the nineteenth century British mind as it blossomed in the Victorian age.)

Our noble Nigel, of course, is always quick to take offense or, under suitable circumstances, land a blow, without thought to the implications of his actions for himself and for many others. This, too, we are led to believe is part of the noble code which he was born to observe. More often saved than saving, young Nigel nevertheless earns his spurs and the sobriquet of "sir" in the final battle of the book and lives to carry his own final greeting in person back to his lady. (Of course he does, as this is a prequel to an earlier book in which he is the protagonist!)

It may well be that the literature of the medieval period presented warriors in just this way, that is if they were the real thing, i.e., proper Christian knights and not mere commoners or those of noble blood who fell from such an exacting standard. But it strikes one as far-fetched, at the least, that real human beings living in violent societies, who were committed to blood and plunder, ever actually thought or acted according to such standards. More likely this was superimposed on the stories and traditions by clerics seeking to tame genuinely greedy and brutal men. It is in that literary tradition, of course, that Conan Doyle sought to compose his tales of historic chivalry and knightly adventure echoing the high-sounding refrains, the glorious language and codas of a later England and, certainly of the Romantic period that took hold in the Victorian Age. In keeping with the model he elected to follow, Conan Doyle's tale follows an episodic form, taking us from one seemingly self-contained adventure to the next within a broader and less tightly drawn frame and with little characterization or growth. Nigel at the end is just a little more experienced but no less the spiritual fool of a knight that he was at the beginning.

As an example of this kind of writing, found also in the likes of William Morris (The Well at the World's End: Volume I, The Sundering Flood) who sought to emulate high medieval poetry and romance (see Amadis of Gaul, Volume 1), of H. Rider Haggard who did much the same with his Viking novel (Eric Brighteyes - Haggard, Henry Rider, 1856-1925) and of Cervantes who mocked it all with his Don Quixote (Penguin Classics)), this one by Conan Doyle seems pale by comparison. Young Nigel Loring is too thick and too naive, one is moved to think, to have actually succeeded as portrayed by Conan Doyle although he is also too lucky, which saps our capacity to care much about him while it papers over his other ill-conceived "virtues".

I've read that Conan Doyle actually preferred his simpleminded creation, Sir Nigel, to his famous detective and if that is so, I must say I'm quite surprised. On the other hand, the judgement of readers in his time and afterwards seems to have overridden even that misbegotten authorial passion, for it is Holmes, the fascinatingly eccentric Victorian detective whose intuition masquerades as deduction, we mostly remember today of Conan Doyle's work. The bantam knight Nigel Loring, along with Professor Challenger, another of Conan Doyle's famous creations, remain also-rans to their more noble, and certainly more interesting, detective cousin.

On the other hand it remains possible that I am just finally grown tired of the medieval ethos and my appreciation for Sir Nigel must suffer from the lateness of my discovery of it.

Stuart W. Mirsky
author of The King of Vinland's Saga

I initially read `The White Company' as a recommended adventure book for young readers (I read it to my son). I then picked up `Sir Nigel' as its companion-piece, only to learn later that it is regarded by some as one of the 100 essential English novels of any genre. I believe that recognition is well-deserved.

Sir Nigel is the story of Nigel Loring's rise from impoverished local nobility, through his status as Squire to the historical figure John Chandos, to his eventual knighting after accomplishing multiple heroic tasks and adhering to a code of chivalry which was beginning to fade even as the story takes place. Although a bit bloody in pieces, young readers should enjoy the many action and battle-pieces, beginning with Nigel's fight at the monastery and ending with the skirmish against the French at Maupertuis. Of greater interest to the adult reader are the near-forgotten lessons in honor, loyalty, chivalry, constancy, and respect which are sorely lacking from similar literature today.

Because of its message and pace, I would recommend this for the average high school student. Because of its writing and plotting, I would recommend this for the average adult reader (it is, after all, written by the venerable Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). For its final paragraph, I would recommend it to anyone, especially young writers trying to learn how to close a book: "So lie the dead leaves; but they and such as they nourish forever that great old Truck of England, which still sheds forth another crop and another, each as strong and as fair as the last..."

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this book. I very much enjoyed Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books, but there is quite a difference between detective stories set in the present (or at least what wast the present at the turn of the 20th century) and adventure books set in the Middle Ages. I am pleased to say that Doyle is just as good at adventure as he as at mystery, which is saying quite a bit.

I will refrain from explaining the plot to you once again, as that has already been done several times in previous reviews. What I wish to note in particular is the incredible realism Doyle mixes with outlandish chivalry. I find this difficult to explain, but the best I can do is briefly compare it to the Arthurian novels of the great Howard Pyle of the same era as Doyle. Pyle's books are the embodiment of boyhood ideals of chivalry. Knights fight for honor, and live in something resembling a fairy-tale land (though not quite as preposterous). Doyle's world, on the other hand, is the real world. It is a place of suffering mixed with joy, and the cunning of worldy men alongside the chivalry of others. It is a place where a man is actually liable to be crushed by a blow, whereas in Pyle's world a hero would seemingly have to try very hard to incapacitate himself. Doyle's world is actually meant to be historically accurate, and he took great trouble to research what he was writing about. This explanation is but one aspect of the "realness" of Doyle's style, but I find it impossible to adequately explain, and you will simply have to read the book to understand.

In truth, I prefer Pyle, but Doyle is not far behind. The difference would be largely made up for if Doyle's book contained excellent drawings and superb archaic english like Pyle's do. If you like Pyle, I imagine you will be delighted to find another author who writes Medieval adventure with so much skill, especially in so unlikely a figure (at least, to those of us used only to thinking of him as the author of the Sherlock Holmes books) as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I'm very much looking forward to finding the sequel.

Overall grade: A.