Hodd - Hardcover

Thorpe, Adam

3.22

189 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224079433 ISBN 13: 9780224079433

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2009

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Who was Robin Hood? Romantic legend casts him as outlaw, archer, and hero of the people, living in Sherwood Forest with Friar Tuck, Little John and Maid Marian, stealing from the rich to give to the poor - but there is no historical proof to back this up. The early ballads portray a quite different figure: impulsive, violent, vengeful, with no concern for the needy, no merry band, and no Maid Marian.
Hodd provides a possible answer to this famous question, in the form of a medieval document rescued from a ruined church on the Somme, and translated from the original Latin. The testimony of an anonymous monk, it describes his time as a boy in the greenwood with a half-crazed bandit called Robert Hodd - who, following the thirteenth-century principles of the 'heresy of the Free Spirit', believes himself above God and beyond sin. Hodd and his crimes would have been forgotten without the boy's minstrel skills, and it is the old monk's cruel fate to know that not only has he given himself up to apostasy and shame, but that his ballads were responsible for turning a murderous felon into the most popular outlaw hero and folk legend of England, Robin Hood.
Written with his characteristic depth and subtlety, his sure understanding of folklore, his precise command of detail, Adam Thorpe's ninth novel is both a thrilling re-examination of myth and a moving reminder of how human innocence and frailty fix and harden into history.

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Review:

"A beguiling new novel... Hodd displays all of Thorpe's gifts for impersonation, translation and self-made "sources", since this is a novel served up as a curated text" (Richard T. Kelly Financial Times)

"A tour de force around an elusive thirteenth-century figure who may, or may not, have been the original fantasy Robin Hood we think we know and love. Let's hope this year's Booker lot are up to estimating this wonderfully subtle and layered book at its true worth" (Gillian Tindall Literary Review)

"The sounds and smells - Thorpe is particularly strong on stinks and stenches, rotten food and worse drinks, infections and cancers - ring horribly true...if Robin Hood did exist, this is probably what he and his not so merry men were like" (Fordyce Maxwell Scotland on Sunday)

"Writing both as the monk and as the translator from 1926 who scatters the text with footnotes, Thorpe plays a double role, and emerges from this tour de force of the historical imagination with distinction" (Alistair Mabbott Sunday Herald)

"[Thorpe] has an uncanny ability to create and inhabit a peculiar consciousness... the result is a fascinating and complex novel - as remarkable in its way as Ulverton, but in no way resembling it" (Henry Power Times Literary Supplement)

Book Description:

The brilliant new novel from a truly great writer - a return in style to his great novel Ulverton

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