The Walking Drum
| Author: | L'Amour, Louis |
| Genre: | Novel - Historical |
| Written in the year 1984 and set in the time period: 1170s-1180s | |
| Places: | |
| Originally entered by James Schellenberg (Sep-02) | |
| Rating: | 7/10 |
Comments
Louis L'Amour is better known for his westerns, but The Walking Drum is a historical novel set in the 12th century that follows the adventures of a man named Kerbouchard. Kerbouchard's father is a corsair, presumed lost at sea, and in the meantime, local villains kill his mother and burn the family home to the ground. Kerbouchard escapes and through one scrape or another makes his way to Cadiz on the coast of Spain and then for a long time in Cordoba. This first part of the book deals extensively with how advanced and tolerant Arabic culture was at the time (Kerbouchard makes a good living copying and translating books at one point). Due to some other scrapes, he makes his way to Paris with a merchant caravan, which later heads off to Istanbul by way of a fatal stop in Kiev. All along, Kerbouchard has heard that his father has not been killed, but rather captured and enslaved by the Assassins in the northern part of Persia (now Iran). With one last stop in Tabriz, he makes his way to a final showdown. As my description indicates, this book has lots of escapades and battles and beautiful women, and is written in a weirdly breathless style that is not very graceful. At the same time, however, L'Amour obviously did a lot of research for this book, and the reader learns much about the important ideas and thinkers of the time, most of whom were Arabic or flourished under Arabic tolerance.
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