The Lute Player

Synopsis
The crusade of Richard the Lionheart, told by his mother, his lute player, and his sister-in-law.

My thoughts
This is a long book - more than 500 pages - and a lot happens. But what's more striking is what doesn't happen.

This book is remarkable in that it was published in 1951 and it presents Richard I as a homosexual man. Norah Lofts was ahead of her time; she writes Richard without judgment. But she doesn't go any further. The legend (as I remember it) goes that Richard was kidnapped and held captive on his way home from his crusade. No one knew where he was, but his lute player Blondel went from castle to castle searching for him. Blondel would sing a verse from a song he and Richard had written and then he'd pause. He finally found Richard when Richard replied with the next verse from wherever he was locked up. In my imagination, Richard and Blondel were in love, but Lofts shies away from writing it this way and Blondel doesn't even get to tell this most dramatic part of the story. Instead, Richard's sister-in-law, who wasn't even there, gets to narrate this part.

None of this actually happened anyway, but it makes a nice story. There was a medieval lute player named Blondel and he did go on crusade. Richard and his wife Berengaria of Navarre did not have a happy marriage, although Lofts created Berengaria's bastard half-sister Anna for the book. This led to an extremely unsatisfactory love quadrangle: Anna loved Blondel, who loved Berengaria, who loved Richard, who loved Blondel. Fortunately, Eleanor of Aquitaine's point of view was free of this messy narrative and all the better for it. Eleanor is a fascinating woman and I enjoyed her chapters a lot. She also balanced out the hysterical Berengaria nicely.

Bottom line
Solid historical fiction, if a little dated. There's also that anticlimactic ending.

Fine print
The Lute Player, by Norah Lofts
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book.