The stuff of heroes

[bibliogramma]

Having quite enjoyed the first of David Gemmell’s Drenai books, Legend, I’ve been reading more of the Drenai, in The King Beyond the Gate and Waylander.

Gemmell’s Drenai books are not, in the strictest sense, a series, but rather a sequence of books set in the same place, but a different periods of time, with few recurring characters. It’s more a loose grouping of epic histories about a time and place that never was. What seems to tie them together so far is their examination of such questions as honour, courage, loyalty, glory, heroism, victory and what it means to be a legend, in a world that is often beset by wars, both internal and external. There’s a stripped-down quality to Gemmell’s writing, at least in the Drenai books, that pares away everything not essential to the study of these questions.

It’s an almost classical style and sensibility, one that would be at home in telling the story of the 300 at Thermopylae or Horatius at the bridge – stories that, not surprisingly, look at the same kinds of themes.