Warrior Scarlet
Rosemary Sutcliff
The title itself is captivating and speaks of the wild and untameable, it is a title that sticks in your head and for years I thought I had read this book because of that. It is a skill of Rosemary Sutcliff to get to that beating heart of things, I feel the same about The Eagle of the Ninth (although I have actually read that!). This is a story set towards the end of the Bronze Age and at times it feels very alien indeed, a world where you live by your connection to nature. One where the skills it takes to thrive are very different to our own. A scene where characters are tracking a wolf feels almost magical in its strangeness to our modern world. Most of the story though goes to the heart of people and emotions and what it is to be human: the bonds of kinship, struggle and perseverance, the intertwining of fear and anger, courage and the desperation to belong. The emotions in Warrior Scarlet are not static things they, as much as the setting, are wild barely tameable forces. Characters respond with anger to protect their fear and sense of self, they get caught up in currents of emotions and their responses are complex, influenced by societal and social tides more than their own will.
As a child I struggled with the idea that emotions were not biddable. I could not feel sad or happy or sorry on demand. I felt I should be able to match my emotions to what I wanted to feel, they were part of me so why did they not follow my will. It was partly through books like this that I came to terms with the complicated reality of emotions. That I became able to reason and add a logic to the seeming wilds of emotion. For this book isn’t one where emotions are without reason, there are causes and effects and responses are understandable in a way that builds empathy even when we are frustrated at a character’s choices. This is a wonderful magic of books, to make explicit the internal contradictions of our minds and to add clarity to our struggle to understand. A scene which does this brilliantly is at the crowning of the new king as currents of temper bubble over into a duel. The depiction of how this comes about makes muddy waters incredibly clear and shows the duel in context. A physical challenge but also one requiring an understanding and control of politics and emotion. Like all good books dealing with emotion this makes you feel too, it makes characters work for their successes, Drem in the main but also Blai, and so when they do get to experience those successes they are all the more real to the reader.
I also really liked the depiction of disability in the book. I love Drem’s early, almost startled, realisation that others see him as disabled, something he has never thought of until then. Followed by his later wonder that someone else sees his worries because they have had the same difficulty and felt the same worries. It speaks of the importance of representation, of seeing others like you in shaping the boundaries of your possible. It also represents well how others react to your otherness and the pressure that standing out can put on you.
There are key moments in the book where chance intercedes, something that shows that hard work alone will not necessarily save you, that this is a harsh world where random chance can play as much a part as skill or courage. This random wildness fits with the constant descriptions of nature and weather as central to life in a way that modern society often tries to remove. Charles Keeping’s illustrations are a perfect complement to that wildness, deeply human but with a wildness of their own. In the face of this, often harsh, randomness the bonds of friendship, family and mentorship are crucial and they are shown well here, I particularly love both the friendship of Drem and Vortrix and the mentorship of Talore.
Written by Jack.