lorendiac's Full Review: Fiona Patton - The Stone Prince
There were some amusing moments in my reading of this novel, but not necessarily the things the author meant to be amusing. As I read along, I started thinking, "Good grief! She's trying to describe Merry Old England - if only it had been more Politically Correct in the medieval days!" I think I can honestly say I never expected to see such a thing.
I suspected her logic went like this: "Medieval Europe was very male-dominated, so I'll let either gender inherit the throne instead. And either gender can be clergy, and either gender can be warriors! Also, most people these days seem to think of "lord" as being a more dominant word that "lady," so I'll have all aristocrats referred to as Lord Whoever!" [NOTE: This got really confusing for me, but perhaps I'm old fashioned. Couldn't she have invented a brand new gender-neutral form of address if she wanted one so badly?] "Med. Eur. had a double standard for men and women in sexual activity (especially if the men were aristocrats), so I'll let everyone be equally promiscuous. (I'll even give young women an absolutely safe and reliable herb to use for birth control so that promiscuous behavior doesn't cause unwanted babies the way it historically did!) Med. Eur. had a religious bias against homosexuality, so I'll smash that to shreds by making it clear that every proper unmarried aristocrat above a certain age has a "Companion" who is a sort of combination bodyguard and sexual convenience (since the Companion is always the same gender as the aristocrat). Later on, though, the aristocrats get married and have heirs, so at one stroke, I've made every single important aristocratic character bisexual, and this is considered normal!"
There was even a token nod toward the modern ideal of letting popular opinion choose national government. At the very end, the hero (equivalent of the King of England, with different names) has won another battle over the Scottish rebels (again a different name) and he reflects that this has been going on for hundreds of years, ever since his nation supposedly "conquered and assimilated" theirs - but they keep rebelling, and rebelling, and rebelling some more! He finally decides it's not worth the thousands and thousands of deaths that have occurred over this issue, and announces he's going to pull out and let the Scots (technically the Heathlanders, but I kept thinking Scots, Scots, Scots!) have their own silly country back, and put their old Scottish dynasty back on a proper throne if that's what appeals to everyone. Then maybe he can turn them into voluntary allies instead of continually having to trample them into something resembling submission.
He decides this immediately after a bloody battle. If he had made the decision a day or two sooner, it would have been a lot easier on everybody. But I suppose better late than never!
So I was amused by the extreme measures Patton took to make her "Hero" (not that this Prince-then-King ever really impressed me as a loveable character) be very careful to develop attitudes which would not offend modern "politically correct" sensibilities.
There was also a series of flashbacks showing us the buildup to an early armed rebellion the Prince (before his mother the monarch died) had staged against his mother. Problem was, by the time we got to the last scene in that sequence (Patton kept alternating between "present" material and "several years ago" material, as I recall) we already knew exactly how it had all turned out from references in the "present" scenes, so I really couldn't see what the point was in alternating that way. Giving us the scenes from his adolescence all in a lump as the first section of the novel might have made more sense.
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