Book Analysis: GODIVA

Author: David Rose
Publisher: Whitaker House (September 2004; 357 pages; Hardcover)
ISBN: 0883680289
Genre: Historical

In the spring of 1016, King Canute the Merciless ruthlessly leads his Viking army in an invasion of King Edmund Ironside's England. With the assistance of English traitor Earl Edric Streona, Canute cuts a bloody swath across the budding countryside. None can stand against his ferocity or seemingly overwhelming numbers.

The arrival of Canute's fearsome warriors threatens to separate many loyalties. The earldom of Southern Mercia is no exception. One of the earl's sons joins Canute's bloody campaign, while the other, Leofric, tries to convince his father it is better to die with honor for king and country. Instead, the earl urges Leofric's promise to bide his time for an opportunity when resistance will be more useful for England.

Canute prides himself on not being easily fooled, however. And Leofric has other enemies, those within his own family, who watch impatiently for Leofric to plunge disastrously off the political tightrope he unwillingly walks.

His first test approaches with the speed of Canute's army toward the small village of Coventry. There, the sheriff's beautiful young daughter Godiva studies under Sister Osburga and devotes her affection to God's animal kingdom. The nightmare of the Viking invaders seems as distant as the Ashingdon fields where King Edmund is assembling his defensive forces. Little do Godiva and her loved ones anticipate the savagery that will soon rend their idyllic existence, or the confrontation of wills and beliefs that will shortly be set into motion.

Godiva is written with the quick pace and widening scope of an epic movie. That isn't surprising, considering the author's award-winning background in film. The story remains taut and interesting throughout, while the stakes rise vertically for individual characters and expand horizontally to include whole nations. It would have been easy for Godiva's story, shrouded in legend and heavily researched by Rose, to bog down in historical narration, but it doesn't. The events speak loudly enough for themselves that the necessity for long passages explaining historical points is kept to a minimum, and Godiva comes alive as a fun tale.

Godiva has all the elements of a great story. What handicaps its potential is the double-edge of Rose's screenwriting talent: he tells as much as he shows. Some lines read like stage or actor directions rather than descriptions. This confused my sense of timing in the first part of the book. The author tells the reader months pass between Canute's landing on English soil and the final battle against Edmund Ironsides. However, because none of the point-of view characters are shown reacting to the time passing, it feels like Part One occurs in only a matter of days.

This handicap also negatively affected my comprehension of the stakes later in the book, when Godiva risks the Catholic Church coming against her if she rides nude in a pagan fertility festival. The religious consequences of her actions are big--at least, that's what readers are told--but without a scene to show readers the ramifications of excommunication, it's difficult to feel how serious it is. By contrast, the battle scenes earlier in the book showed Coventry's suffering at Canute's hands, so the threat from him near the end of the book felt very real. My imagination had something to relate to those stakes.

The point of view (POV) pans and zooms much like a camera, which made the story easy to imagine as a movie. Amazingly, Rose managed to keep it clear each time whose head the reader was in, so I didn't feel as confused as I should have. However, he cannot avoid the inevitable consequence of frequent POV shifts among multiple characters. The rich characterizations that could have been mined from complex characters like Godiva, Canute, and Leofric are only skimmed over. I wanted to bond with these epic-quality characters on a much deeper level than the cinematic approach to POV permitted.

Godiva is a good story. It's a quick, entertaining, and worthy read. David Rose is a promising author, whom I think with a little more mastery of the finer points of novel writing could have made Godiva's story the great story it deserved to be. Even so, a good story trumps good writing.